Numlock News: November 9, 2026 • Godzilla, Ganges, Great Unconformity

Nov 09, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Spirit

In February, Spirit Airlines was working through its Chapter 11 bankruptcy and cut a deal to sell 20 of its yellow A320 jets for $533 million to CSDS Asset Management, a company that deals in aircrafts. Well, in a somewhat fitting moment for the customer service icons at Spirit, that sale appears to be unraveling, with the lawyers that represent the legal remains of Spirit suing CSDS over missed deadlines and, with $507 million as yet unpaid, missed payments. On the other side of the transaction, UCK Airports, a Qatari firm, was lined up to buy six of those jets from CSDS, but since CSDS hasn’t actually bought them, it looks like UCK Airports is not getting its jets.

Tom Quinn and Zana Scarlett, 9fin

Godzilla

Godzilla Minus Zero has made $31.6 million from 3,254 theaters, a huge start for the film and the single largest opening day for a live-action foreign language film in North America ever, beating the $17.8 million record notched by Hero in 2002. The movie made 74 percent of its ticket sales in premium large-format, which makes sense, because if there’s one thing the biggest screens in the world are probably meant for, it’s a Godzilla movie. I saw the film in 4DX — the one where the seat moves and there’s fog and water and stuff — and straightforwardly, I’m not going to lie, the ultimate tactile impact of Godzilla Minus Zero was essentially the sensation of riding a mechanical bull. It has been two days, and I still feel as if Godzilla personally kicked my ass; this is not a joke. You should absolutely see it in 4DX.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Kickers

Former Canadian Football League kicker Tadhg Leader returned to Ireland and founded Leader Kicking in 2022, which works with Gaelic footballers who want to make the leap to the American game. It’s been a highly successful effort, as, according to the group, there are now 20 Irish athletes active across NCAA Division I and the NFL. There’s precedent for a society realizing that it’s actually easier and more lucrative to kick an American football than kicking the ball in their local variety of rugby; a similar effort in Australia that began in 2007 to mint punters out of Aussie has resulted in six current NFL starters from Australia.

Jacob Feldman, Sportico

NCIS

After Grey’s Anatomy, the best-performing show on streaming since 2020 is humble workhorse NCIS, which has racked up 219.89 million minutes streamed since. According to CBS, over the life of the show, it’s made $10 billion and is particularly popular in Europe. This makes sense, as any American who has ever flipped on television while visiting a European country can attest; if there’s one thing that continent likes, it’s competent, aging investigators from obscure government law enforcement bureaus investigating grisly crimes in the vicinity of the coast. As far as I can tell, it’s the single most popular genre after panel shows and Eurovision.

Lucas Shaw, Bloomberg

Tires

Bridgestone is best known for its automobile tires, but they’re also responsible for producing ultralarge tires for specialized applications, behemoths that can have a diameter of four meters and weigh six metric tons, used in things like mining and construction. It’s a great business to be in; the profit margins for passenger and light truck tires are around 10.7 percent, but the specialty tire business has profit margins nearly double that at 20.1 percent. Globally, the market for off-the-road tires is projected to rise by half to $28.19 billion by 2034. The beads where the tire meets the wheel rim use more than 3,000 meters of steel cable on a mining tire, and a curing stage that takes 20 minutes for a car tire needs 12 hours for a 63-inch tire.

Seiya Ota, Nikkei Asia

Ganges

Cleaning the Ganges River has been the subject of a $4.5 billion program in India over the past decade. The river remains dangerously polluted, despite the construction of hundreds of sewage treatment plants and other waste infrastructure, and the industrial base that dumps into the river supports a region responsible for 40 percent of the country’s economic output. A Bloomberg analysis of 2,000 kilometers of the river using satellite imagery over the past decade found that just 10 percent of the area showed signs of sustained improvement.

Shruti Srivastava, Krishna Karra and Lou Del Bello, Bloomberg

Unconformity

The Great Unconformity is the name for the fact that we’re missing more than hundreds of millions, or in some places, over a billion years of the rock record; for example, in the Grand Canyon, a layer of sedimentary rock that’s 540 million years old is directly on top of another layer that is up to two billion years old. The reason for this has been a mystery; a new theory tested on an Australian supercomputer puts mantle movement as a cause, with the massive but slow movement pushing continents up and down. When the continental blocks were pushed up — as had taken place on the ancient continents of Laurentia, Baltica and North China, which were lifted up between a billion and 540 million years ago — the layers of sediment that had built up eroded away, often scraped away by enormous ice sheets of the Snowball Earth period, and then when the blocks sank again, new layers of sediment formed. Meanwhile, in Australia and South America — where there is less evidence of the Great Unconformity — there were only two cycles of uplift and subsidence over the past 900 million years.

Santosh Dhungana and Nicholas Flament, The Conversation

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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