Numlock News: May 20, 2025 • Mars, Joe Pantoliano, Swing

May 20, 2025

By Walt Hickey

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Dye

A new federal plan pushes food, beverage and pharmaceutical makers to eliminate synthetic dyes that have become a bit of a boogeyman for some despite being generally regarded as safe. This is causing manufacturers some consternation over how to actually proceed. Red No. 40, Blue No. 1, Blue No. 5 and Yellow Dye No. 5 have been convenient and safe ways to make food an appealing color, and natural substitutes are five to ten times more expensive. These substitutes are also, to be clear, hard to come by: if you want to replace Red 40 with red cabbage extract, you have to grow and crush a whole lot of cabbage for a little color. Good luck finding a blue in the wild that can be harvested in viable quantities and that people want to eat; there are only two recently approved natural dyes, one comes from a butterfly pea flower, and the other comes from algae.

Yuki Noguchi, NPR

Mars

A new study published in Nature Communications looked at the interesting land features on Mars (mainly streaks running down cliff-sides and craters) that are similar to the appearance of a now-dry water run. These areas are interesting since they’re generally going to be avoided by future explorations; if they were once water bodies — perhaps caused by melted ice, or something — then they’d also be contenders for finding evidence of life, and we wouldn’t want to contaminate them with Earth life. This new study, however, dumped a bunch of dry water on the theory, analyzing 86,000 high-resolution satellite images of Mars to study 500,000 streak features and ultimately concluding that they are probably caused by wind and dust activity.

Brown University

Cable

The world yearns for cable, according to a new report from Hub Entertainment Research. The survey of 1,600 consumers with broadband access found that the percentage of respondents who subscribe to at least three of the “Big 7” streaming video on demand services (Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Peacock and Paramount+) declined from 61 percent in 2024 to just 52 percent in 2025. The top drivers of signups are now the package deals that allow people to get a few of the services for an overall discounted price, and the data agrees. Among respondents who had only direct subscriptions to streaming services, the average number of paid subscriptions was 3.2. Among those subscribing to at least one service through aggregators, the average is 6.0, indicating that perhaps a decade spent cracking the bundle may have been an error on the part of the entertainment business.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Swing and Miss

Major League Baseball is finally getting around to answering one of the more crucial elements of the game, specifically, what is a “swing?” The answer heretofore has been “whatever the umpire says it is,” and is only relevant when a batter begins to take a swing at a ball but then abruptly reverses the motion, “checking” the pitch. The umpires would often call this a ball, whereas a completed swing would have been a strike. It’s all weedsy, so the league is rolling out a replay system in Single-A Florida State League ball that will determine if a bat is ahead of the corner of the plate (“the knob”) by at least 45 degrees, at which point it will indeed be a swing. This might pose some adjustment; as it stands, umpires call swings and no-swings equally at 18 degrees.

Jared Diamond, The Wall Street Journal

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Joey Pants

Joe Pantoliano is one of that class of actors known by many for the way he leaves a movie or show: often dead. He played Cypher in The Matrix and Ralph Cifaretto in The Sopranos and is on the Mount Rushmore of guys who bite it in movies, alongside presumably Sean Bean, Pedro Pascal and Christopher Lee. A new analysis tracked down exactly how many times Pants has bit the dust on screen, finding that he dies in 25 of the 160 credits in his non-animated film and television filmography. He dies roughly 17.5 percent of the time he shows up to work, a rate of professional demise that makes U.S.S. Enterprise Redshirt look like a desk job at OSHA. Don’t feel too bad, though; 83 percent of the time he dies on screen, he is the bad guy.

Carrie Wittmer, Vulture

Air Traffic Control

The U.S. air traffic control system is actually somewhat different than the norm in many places, as it’s not entirely a given that the agency regulating airspace directly oversees the air traffic control system. In 1995, only five countries separated their ATC from their aviation safety regulator; today, that figure stands at 62 countries. There are benefits to making ATC providers either independent government corporations (like, say, Amtrak) or nonprofits, namely that they can develop long-term capital plans by borrowing money and commissioning upgrades on their own. In fact, 92 percent of the Federal Aviation Administration’s capital budget is for maintaining legacy systems, not building out the new state-of-the-art tech other countries have. All the times that Congress has attempted to change the FAA’s air traffic control services to a system modeled after Canada’s Nav Canada have failed, stymied after the private plane lobby killed the bill because they pay pretty much nothing to use the federal system.

Dorothy Robyn, The Atlantic

Diamond out the Rough

After bankruptcy, an auction, lawsuits, pulled bids and more chaos, the business that served as the key intermediary of the American comic book business has finally been sold to a pair of owners, hopefully bringing some stability to one of the more unique media markets in American pop culture. The original victorious bid for Diamond Comics was to Alliance Entertainment, which pulled out of the deal with just hours to go. They also launched a lawsuit against Diamond, claiming that Alliance Entertainment was misled about the status of a distribution contract for Wizards of the Coast products. The new owners — Universal Distribution, which will take on the game distribution business, and Ad Populum, which will take on Diamond Comics Distributors and many other related companies — have gone forward with the purchase, though the lawsuit from Alliance is still evidently ongoing. One reported dealbreaker for the previous buyer is Alliance Entertainment not setting up to profitably process items valued at less than $5. This is a problem for a comic book distributor, because all comics pretty much cost less than $5. This issue would mean either the cover price of a single comic rising sharply or the company having to overhaul its own business, too.

Scott Thorn, ICV2

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