Numlock News: November 13, 2025 • Penny, Hamilton, Grades

Nov 13, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Penny

Production of the penny one-cent coin concluded in Philadelphia yesterday after years of agitation for phasing out the coin. People cited the four cents it costs to produce a penny and the diminished utility of a one-cent piece. The production phase-out has not been seamless; constrained supply without clear messaging has meant shortages for convenience stores and the like. Even still, after entering circulation in 1793, all the pennies that will ever be made have indeed been made. The final pennies will be auctioned off. This is kind of a big deal since the last time a U.S. coin was discontinued was the half-cent in 1857.

Maryclaire Dale, The Associated Press

Whales

Scientific observation of whales has undergone a technological revolution in recent years as new off-the-rack drones facilitate the kind of observation and tagging that was once a pipe dream for biologists studying cetaceans. Take, for instance, SnotBot, a drone fitted with six petri dishes that flies over whales when they surface and takes a mucus sample by merely gliding through the mist of a whale’s blowhole. Boats (which used to be the main platform by which researchers observed whales) annoy the animals, but these giants don’t really seem to mind the small drones. One researcher said that the field has spotted more unique behaviors — such as 9-hour footage of 25 killer whales revealing they used kelp to groom each other — in the past five to eight years than the field had seen in the previous 30.

Gennaro Tomma, Knowable Magazine

Wait For It

Billboard has a weekly chart tracking the top Cast Albums, and past 10 years, it has been dominated by the original Broadway cast recording of Hamilton: An American Musical. Out of the 528 weeks since the Hamilton cast album came out, the album has been No. 1 on the chart for 454 weeks. In fact, it has never even left the chart. The usual trend goes like this: cast album comes out, enjoys a week or two at the top of the chart and then the ambient background radiation of people listening to Hamilton overwhelms that initial burst of interest. This week, Hamilton is down to No. 2 yet again. However, that’s only because the No. 1 spot does, in fact, go to Hamilton: 10 Shots, which earned 17,000 equivalent album units upon release. The main Hamilton cast album still has juice even when compared to the broader music industry; it has spent 528 consecutive weeks on the normal Billboard 200 as well, peaking at No. 2 in 2020 but these days hovering around No. 69 as of last week.

Keith Caulfield, Billboard

Harvard

A popular Boston-area university has been consumed by an internal report arguing that grade inflation at Harvard has gotten completely out of hand. In the 2005-06 school year, 25 percent of all grades were A’s, and in the 2024-25 school year, 60 percent of grades were A’s. The average time students spent studying has remained flat — 6.08 hours per week in fall 2006 to 6.3 hours as of last spring — and the median GPA — the median! — upon graduation is 3.89, up from 3.29 in 1985. Proposed solutions to rein in the issue have been opposed by Harvard students.

Roshan Fernandez, The Wall Street Journal

Age

A new survey found that if they had a choice, on average, Americans would want to live to be 91 years old. In total, 23 percent said they’d want their lifespan to last until their 80s, 24 percent said their 90s and 23 percent would want to live until they were between 100 and 119. Just seven percent would prefer to live for 120 years or more; those modern Methuselah and Noldor of the now are the genuine exception to the rule.

John Gramlich and Luona Lin, Pew Research Center

Scammers

Google has gone to court to try to take down the alleged perpetrators behind that ocean of scam texts about unpaid tolls or failed deliveries. The company argues that an enterprise called Lighthouse is ultimately responsible for producing a phishing-as-a-service software used to con countless people. The complaint states that Lighthouse charges a monthly licensing fee to provide SMS and e-commerce software to websites that take the appearance of government and financial institutions. These scam sites track user keystrokes as well, meaning the scammer gets data even if a customer skips pressing “submit.” Google says that in 20 days, Lighthouse was used to make 200,000 fraudulent websites, and estimates that the scam compromised 12.7 million to 115 million credit cards.

Lauren Feiner, The Verge

Nuclear

The United States Energy Department’s loan office will be backing lots of new nuclear reactors and offering billions of dollars in equity financing capital to get them off the ground. Westinghouse Electric — which produces the AP1000 reactor — is poised to be a significant beneficiary. BMO Capital Markets projects that a partnership with the government means 31 new Westinghouse reactors built around the world by 2040, including 12 that are already under construction. In the entirety of this century, only three reactors have been completed in the United States.

Frédéric Tomesco, Mining.com

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