Numlock News: May 21, 2025 • Panthers, Jaguars, Jar Jar Binks

May 21, 2025

By Walt Hickey

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Jaguars

Jaguars are native to the Americas, and once had a territorial range extending all the way out to Louisiana. Now their existence in the United States requires the government to maintain openings in a border wall with Mexico, which is obviously deeply contentious for non-wildlife reasons. Nevertheless, efforts are being made to preserve the species, including a particularly exciting project in Mexico designed to incentivize ranchers against killing jaguars, since the animals will occasionally nosh on a farm animal. The strategy, which I simply must point out has distinct similarities with the premise of the video game Pokémon Snap, entails buying photos of jaguars from trail cams set up on ranch properties, making live jaguars worth more than dead ones. The program pays 5,000 pesos (about US$260) for a photo of a jaguar, 1,500 pesos for a picture of an ocelot, 1,000 pesos per puma pic and 5,000 pesos per bobcat photo. The incentive maxes out at 20,000 pesos (US$1,038) per month for the pictures, double the minimum monthly wage.

Benji Jones, Vox

Lasers

The University of Michigan’s ZEUS laser facility has announced a new, more powerful than ever laser, with its first experiment coming in at 2 petawatts, or 2 quadrillion watts. That is 100 times the global electricity power output, which is why the laser pulse is only 25 quintillionths of a second long. The research at ZEUS has applications in medicine, astrophysics, materials science and more. This is also the kind of facility where researchers from around the world submit experiments they would like the lasers to perform. This demonstration experiment is one step on the way to the ultimate goal of ZEUS, a 3-petawatt laser pulse that will be fired at accelerated electrons moving in the opposite direction, thus making the pulse’s effect a zettawatt-scale from the perspective of the particle. The laser’s biggest challenge was a 7-inch sapphire crystal infused with a titanium atom that should arrive this summer after taking four and a half years to manufacture. I, for one, think that a week after Andor ends is a terrific time to announce a new milestone in your crystal-powered superlaser.

Kate McAlpine, University of Michigan

Scam Centers

Since 2020, over 6,700 Indonesians have been tricked into jobs where they are forced to scam people on the internet — jobs that made elaborate promises on social media but amounted to being sequestered away somewhere in Southeast Asia and forced to coax Americans out of money. Fortified scam compounds are found in the lawless border regions of Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and the Philippines, operated by Chinese criminal syndicates and earning about $40 billion in profits annually. Their workforce is coerced or often effectively kidnapped, and the Indonesian government has stepped up efforts to fight this kind of illegal recruiting, and a special division to that effect saved 7,000 job seekers from ending up in the system.

Linda Yulisman, Rest of World

Darth Jar Jar

Fortnite has introduced a new equippable skin in the game, allowing players to appear as the longstanding Star Wars fan theory of Darth Jar Jar — the failed comic relief character of Jar Jar Binks from The Phantom Menace, but in the form of a Sith lord. The sticker price is a bit shocking: while the opening price for the item is 1,500 V-Bucks (US$13), one needs to earn 1,280,000 XP to actually equip the object, which is a remarkable amount of grinding for the game. A basic battle pass requires 5.6 million XP for 70 levels in the season, so to simply don the guise of Darth Jar Jar, one must grind the equivalent of 17 battle pass levels. The “Darth Jar Jar” fan theory holds that George Lucas originally intended for the character to embark on a shocking heel-turn to the dark side at a later point in the prequels, and would be revealed to be a powerful Sith user, affecting his oafishness as a deception. The theory claims that Lucas lost his nerve upon the poor reception of Binks, discarding the planned reveal that a buffoon might eventually become an architect of fascism within a declining republic. Mr. Lucas will merely have to content himself with the an idea well ahead of its time, that the head of a global hegemon would willingly facilitate a trade conflict that might hasten its decline.

Patricia Hernandez, Polygon

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Bing Bong

The New York Knicks are good and have moved on to the semifinals of the NBA playoffs. Given that the other three teams in the playoffs are all from areas that have never won in the NBA Finals, the ratings for the playoffs have been great so far. Through 22 games, ABC and ESPN are reporting playoff viewership is up 12 percent, with an average of 4.88 million viewers per telecast, the second-most watched postseason in 14 years. Including the TNT and truTV games, the games as a whole are up 3.3 percent over the same period a year ago, in a moment where overall television viewership is down 9 percent.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Weather

For decades, it’s generally held that any weather forecast more than two weeks out will probably be unreliable due to atmospheric complications, an idea first coined as “the butterfly effect” in the 1960s. New algorithms, some of which use machine learning tools, are trying to break that cap on forecasting. Today, meaningful forecasts can be predicted at about ten days out, but the two-week limit is still generally held. Google produced an AI model called Graphcast trained on 40 years of reanalysis data, which managed to improve its own 10-day forecast by 86 percent when trained on initial conditions. Graphcast has since caused some excitement about a new approach by which that two-week mark might be beaten.

Paul Voosen, Science

Balanced

There are four teams remaining in the NHL playoffs, and based on the strength of the teams — the Florida Panthers, the Carolina Hurricanes, the Dallas Stars and the Edmonton Oilers — it appears to be the most evenly matched set of teams since 1943. The average Elo rating of each team is 1572.5, but the average absolute difference from that mean within the four teams is just 3.2 points, with only a 7.5 point distance between the top and bottom team, the lowest ever. Over the past 20 years, that range has been 45 points, on average, and since 1943, there has been an average of 85 points between the best and worst in the final four. It’ll be a great series.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

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