Numlock News: November 5, 2025 • Fan Man, Artists, Houseplants

Nov 05, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Fan Man

This past Sunday, a 40-year-old man from Brooklyn was issued a summons by the NYPD after piloting a $12,000 homemade parachute and motorized propeller over the city. This adventure is one of more than 30 flights above New York and New Jersey that he has executed over the past two years. The Fan Man, Jonathan Warren, says that the cops seized his gear but his flights were, indeed, legal. The NYPD counters that parachuting off the Verrazzano-Narrows bridge is not, in fact, legal. However, the Fan Man rebuts he took off from Bath Beach and the cops made a mistake. According to Warren, the contraption is not a paraglider but rather a paramotor that weighs less than 254 pounds, carries a single person and does not go above 1,400 feet, making it legal. An administrator for the United States Powered Paragliding Association said that the legality will come down to the definition of “uncongested” areas, which is somewhat loosely defined. The bigger question is whether New York still a place where a cavalier inventor can pilot his ingenious newfangled gizmo roundabout the metropolis? Or are the five boroughs inhospitable to our modern Daedalus’ disparate and distinct dipteran doohickies?

Ramsey Khalifeh and Liam Quigley, Gothamist

Demon Hunters

KPop Demon Hunters — which everyone in America now knows about because anyone who missed the boat over the summer presumably got a crash course on Halloween when it inspired conservatively 10 percent of all costumes — has extended its record atop the Netflix Top 10 to 20 weeks. It racked up another 14 million views during the week of October 27 to November 2 which was good enough to be the No. 2 movie of the week on Netflix. The previous record for most weeks in the top ten was Red Notice, which tapered off at 14 weeks.

Selome Hailu, Variety

The Jumanji Line

A new study sought to figure out how many houseplants in a work environment is too many houseplants. It determined that a greenery dose of 20 percent — a room where you can see a plant 20 percent of the time when looking around — was the ideal level. However, 60 percent greenery actually starts to have the wrong impact. The study was based on a 412-participant study in which participants were asked to work in one of 11 possible digital conference rooms with various degrees of vegetation. The study found that when 60 percent of the environment is consumed by plant life, stress levels were exacerbated. In fact, some study participants even gave unsolicited feedback that there simply too many plants.

Ula Chrobak, Stanford University

Artists

As of 2019, there were 2.4 million Americans whose primary occupation was in an artistic field, such as music, design, acting, architecture or visual arts. They make up about one percent of the workforce. That figure was already on the decline, falling from 2.48 million in 2017. Then the pandemic hit and really dealt a blow; the arts economy shrank by 6.4 percent in 2020 (twice the overall job decline levels) and 600,000 jobs disappeared within the artistic occupations.

Joanna Woronkowicz, The Conversation

College

For year, college football stadiums prohibited the sale of alcoholic beverages so they could, you know, keep up the whole charade. However, over the course of the 2010s, many stadiums gave in and started selling booze. After all, those coaches don’t pay for themselves. An investigation sought to find out which stadiums moved the most product, filing open records requests to 45 public universities. The investigation received information from 21 universities that were able to divulge total alcohol unit sales and revenue from August to September 2025. Some of other universities cited either lack of control over their own concession sales or an inability to tally up the figures until the end of the season. But that’s okay because the data confirms what we already surmised: yup, it’s Wisconsin. The University of Wisconsin, Madison sold 255,122 beverages for $3,088,690 in revenue. Wisconsin made over a million dollars more than the runner up. That’s how you maintain a statewide brand.

Matt Brown, Extra Points and Olivia White, VinePair

New Record

In 2022, the Hektoria Glacier near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula began a swift retreat, and over the next 16 months retreated by 25 kilometers. In just two of those months, it lost eight kilometers of glacier. Now, a new study in Nature Geoscience argues that a combination of glacial earthquakes and the breaking of thinned ice prompted the fastest glacial retreat in the modern record. That eight kilometers in two months is an order of magnitude faster than anything else on record.

Hannah Richter, Science

Arabidopsis

A weed tinitially smuggled out of Hungary by a geneticist in 1956 has had an unlikely rise to prominence. The plant Arabidopsis thaliana, a member of the mustard family, has become a superstar model organism. It has served as the experimental basis for over 100,000 research papers. After experimentation in the ’60s, we realized the plant has got some amazing advantages — you can grow thousands in a single room since it’s so small, it generates in six weeks, it’s got over 10,000 seeds per plants and it’s got only five chromosomes, so it was easier to map its genes. Eventually in the 1980s, it was discovered that with just 70,000 kilobase pairs of DNA — vastly smaller than the 1.8 million kbp of soybeans or 5.9 million kbp of wheat — this plant was an ideal contender for genetic research. It certainly helps that this weed can every easily take up up foreign genes with the help of bacteria, leading to a $75 million, decade-long sequencing of the genome.

Rachel Ehrenberg, Knowable Magazine

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