Numlock News: May 29, 2025 • Flying Dutchman, Broadway, Very Large Array
By Walt Hickey
Ending Saturday, we’re celebrating Numlock’s seventh anniversary! The newsletter is still going strong seven years in, and that’s thanks to the many readers who pay to subscribe to the newsletter. We’re doing one of the two big sales that we do every year, and it’s almost over.
I have no immediate plans to raise prices, but 2025 is the last year I can promise that new subscriptions can be $5 per month or $50 per year. This is potentially the best time to subscribe, ever.
Honus Wagner
A rare T206 Honus Wagner — a piece of memorabilia that held the distinction of most valuable baseball card until 2022 when a 1952 Mickey Mantle card sold for $12.6 million — is up for auction. The last time a T206 Mantle was sold, it moved for $7.25 million, and this new card (on the block at Goldin Auctions) instantly rocketed up to $3.17 million upon opening. The organizers will be keeping the auction open until June 21. The rarity of this card and of this player in particular is fascinating. There are only 54 copies known to exist, of which 28 are in poor to fair condition. Wagner himself — the “Flying Dutchman” — is in the Hall of Fame, and popular lore speculates that Wagner did not want to lend his image to a card that sold tobacco products. He was only mistakenly included in the run, and his card was yanked from production after the mistake was found.
Geothermal
Up until recently, for geothermal energy to work, you had to drill into a hotspot where there were large underground reservoirs of hot water. However, the new class of geothermal startups is pushing drilling tech to build subterranean furnaces. Some companies like Eavor are drilling a lattice of boreholes that connect at the bottom, forming loops through which cold water can be piped in and hot water can be piped out, generating power. Simultaneously drilling two parallel holes that intersect in hot bedrock is a steering nightmare, as GPS and electromagnetic signals don’t work at that depth. A new, long-awaited in-house drilling tool with equipment that communicates through magnetic signals just came fully online as of this week. This new tech will save Eavor 120 hours per multilateral pair of holes; given the 12 multilateral pairs per loop, and four loops per pad, that cuts the price of a project by tens of millions of dollars.
Alexander C. Kaufman, Field Notes
Sumo
There’s a new yokozuna in the sport of sumo, a wrestler named Onosato from the Ishikawa prefecture. He’s just 24 years old, and the Japan Sumo Association promoted him to the top rank on Wednesday, just a week after he won the Summer Grand Sumo Tournament. It’s a big win for Japan, as sumo has been dominated by Mongolian wrestlers in recent years — six of the previous seven yokozunas have originally hailed from Mongolia — and the 421-pound (191-kilogram) champ is the first Japanese contender to reach the height of the form since 2017. As a result, he has instantly come into rivalry with the other reigning yokozuna, Hoshoryu.
Stephen Wade, The Associated Press
Who Ploughs The Seas
According to insurer Allianz Commercial’s annual Safety and Shipping Review, a record-low 27 large ships were lost worldwide last year, which is a remarkably low number of ships lost even compared to recent years. Fishing vessels accounted for 10 of them, with cargo vessels (6) just behind. Though tragic, that count of 27 losses is well under the 35 of the previous year, far less than the average of 68.1 ships per year lost over the past decade and vastly lower than the over 200 ships a year that went down in the 1990s.
Broadway
Broadway’s 2024-25 season is coming to an end, and the numbers are great: all told, the season grossed $1.89 billion across all productions, up 23 percent over the 2023-24 season. Most significantly, it exceeds the previous record of $1.83 billion grossed in 2019, the year before the pandemic devastated the live theater and tourism businesses, two industries that have Broadway sitting squarely in their intersection. Overall attendance was 14.66 million, which does not break the previous record (14.77 million in 2018-19), indicating that higher ticket prices, like the eye-watering prices for Othello and Goodnight and Good Luck, may have facilitated this record. That said, in the aggregate, ticket prices were up just 4 percent from the 2018-19 season, so there’s still a ton of value out there.
Caitlin Huston, The Hollywood Reporter
Very Large Array
The Very Large Array (VLA) is a radio telescope in New Mexico composed of 27 antennas spread in a Y-shaped pattern going 22 miles end-to-end. When all antennas are pointed at the same thing, they can imitate an instrument that is, in fact, 22 miles wide. Though already impressive, a new proposal, (the Next Generation Very Large Array or ngVLA) will seriously soup-up its powers of observation by building another 262 antennas throughout the United States — mostly in the Southwest, 192 in the immediate vicinity of the existing VLA. The new proposal would create an instrument capable of detecting a cell phone signal from the Oort Cloud, 500 billion kilometers away, with construction hopefully beginning in 2029 and operations starting in 2033.
Sarah Scholes, Scientific American
Companions
Listen, while there are lots of problems in the world, clearly humanity has got some things going for it — safer seas, astronomy achievements, thriving culture, energy technology, etc. So, I think it’s only right that we take a moment to give some love and appreciation to those companions who have stuck with us from the beginning, have always had our backs and have been with us no matter what. I refer, of course, to bed bugs, which a new study argues may be strong contenders for the oldest urban pest ever. German cockroaches formed a close association with humans only 2,000 years ago, and the black rat joined in on the fun only 5,000 years ago, but bedbugs were with us right when we started making permanent settlements. They made the initial jump from preying on bats to preying on humans 245,000 years ago. Remember, it’s not the achievements that count, it’s the friends and horrifying parasites we made along the way.
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Ships are not being lost because people now know how to avoid them.
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