Numlock News: May 22, 2026 • Jaguar, Cynicism, Sulphuric Acid
By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend!
Incidentally, today is Numlock’s Eighth Anniversary! Thank you for your continued readership and support as we enter our ninth year of this project. We’ll do the sale next week. We are off on Monday in observation of Memorial Day in the United States, see you on Tuesday.
Acid
Another week, another industrial chemical revealed to be in an acute state of low supply owing to the war with Iran that has snarled trade between the petrochemical hubs of the Persian Gulf and the rest of the world. Today’s chemical is sulphuric acid, selling for $400 per tonne as of May 6, up from $155 per tonne on February 25. Among other uses, sulphuric acid is a crucial chemical for mining and refining copper, a metal which has become critical for electrification and other industrial infrastructure. One copper major, Marimaca Copper, has resorted to simply buying a Chilean acid producer in order to ensure access to the acid after shipments from China to Chile fell to zero in March.
Canal
Traffic through the Panama Canal is up sharply as the United States exports energy to the Asia and Pacific markets, with ship transits through the canal averaging 38 per day, up eight percent year over year. The daily maximum capacity of the Panama Canal is 36 to 40 transits a day, so the traffic is pushing the canal to maximum capacity. Wait times are up 50 percent year over year to 47 hours, and this much use with an El Niño on the horizon has administrators already closely monitoring the water levels of Lake Gatún, the water source of the canals and also most of Panama.
Oceania
The top streamed show in the United States for the week of April 20 to 26 was Australian import “Bluey,” which logged 889 million minutes over the week across 889 episodes. In yet another antipodean accomplishment, No. 2 was “The Boys” starring New Zealand’s Karl Urban, which logged 882 million minutes the week of its seventh episode.
Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter
Cynical
A new study published in Evolution and Human Behavior looked at 173 pairs of friends (so 346 subjects in total) to figure out how cynical people thought their friends were. In general, people tended to systematically underestimate how cynical their friends in fact were, tending to have a bias towards positivity, essentially meaning that they tended to view the best in their friends. Overall, people tended to assume their friends were roughly as cynical as they themselves were, and that tended to be a generally accurate assumption. Interestingly, friendship length, trust and closeness seemed to not affect accuracy or bias when it came to ascertaining the cynicism of one’s friends.
Shelly DeJong, Michigan State University
Netflix
Netflix announced that 10 years ago, foreign-language series and movies were less than 10 percent of total viewing on Netflix, a figure that today has risen to a third of total viewing. Last year, 70 percent of viewing on Netflix came from subscribers who were watching stuff from a country that was not their own, indicating that the company has been able to get people interested in non-local content. That isn’t easy or cheap, and requires investing in accessibility tools like subtitles, audio descriptions and dubbing; Netflix reported adding 13,000 hours of audio description across 34 languages in 2025, up 30 percent year over year.
Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News
Hurricane
At a press conference Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that they estimate just one to three major hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean this season running June to November, with a 55 percent chance of below normal conditions, a 35 percent chance of near-normal conditions and a 10 percent chance of above-normal conditions. That cracks out to eight to 14 named storms. Over in the ironically-named Pacific, the expected return of the El Niño climate system is poised to supercharge storm development, with a 70 percent chance of above normal activity in the central and eastern Pacific, with 15 to 22 named storms and five to nine major hurricanes.
Jackie Flynn Mogensen, Scientific American
Jaguars
A major conservation milestone in the Gran Chaco Forest of Argentina occured as photographic evidence of a wild-born jaguar cub has been captured. It’s the first time in at least 30 years that a wild jaguar was born in Argentina’s piece of the second-largest forest of South America. There has been a rewilding project intended to get the cats back on their paws after decades of ranching, farming, logging and mining destroyed their habitat and sent their population to as few as 20 individuals. In 2024, a captive born female jaguar named Nalá was released into the wild, and in 2025, she began lingering in the same spot, a possible indication of a birth; a photograph of Nalá and the cub confirms the milestone, with another female released by Rewilding Argentina identified with a cub a few weeks later.
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As someone who’s going blind and can’t read subtitles, the audio descriptions are *great*. That said, it’s still tough to tell characters apart. Which pretty Latina is that? She looks a lot like the one from a few episodes ago.
But they’re different. How did you miss that?!
Are you BLIND?
Well, almost….