Numlock News: October 10, 2024 • Elephants, Witch Hunts, Kevin Bacon

Oct 10, 2024

Loans

Usually when one takes out a loan, the lender is interested in previous earnings and income. Not so in the high-flying world of athlete finance; lots of players on the 22 MLB teams that didn’t make the playoffs are done for the season, which means they don’t get paychecks for six months and will need to find a way to keep a roof over their heads through April. That’s where a lender like Sure Sports comes in, which in the last year has provided around $125 million to athletes in offseason loans against not their previous earnings but their future contracts. Loans are capped at 30 percent of a player’s guaranteed deal and interest rates tend to hover between 6.5 percent and 7 percent. For players without a guaranteed deal — usually pre-draft candidates — the math gets a little more elaborate, but at the end of the day it’s an increasingly normal trend in sports.

Brendan Coffey, Sportico

Trunk

A new study looked at elephant trunks to figure out how exactly they got their unique form and function. On average, an Asian elephant trunk has 126 wrinkles in it, compared to 83 wrinkles in the average trunk of an African elephant. Those wrinkles begin to form in the womb basically as soon as the trunk does, 20 days into the elephant’s notoriously herculean 22-month gestation period, with the number of wrinkles roughly doubling every three weeks over the next 150 days.

Sara Reardon, Science

Witch Hunts

A new study tracked how witch-hunting crazes swept across Europe, fueled by publications of manuals purporting how to hunt witches. Published in Theory and Society, the study found that in particular the publication of the Malleus maleficarum in 1487 popularized the invented threat of witches, and that witch-hunting was a contagious social phenomenon from city to city. The study looked at witch trials and the publication of witch-hunting manuals in 553 cities in Central Europe from 1400 to 1679.

Santa Fe Institute

Kevin Bacon

The “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game, where one tries to connect any given actor to Kevin Bacon by means of naming a chain of actors who have worked together, is obviously in increasing trouble given the lagging film career of Kevin Bacon. The game emerged in the mid-1990s as a riff on both his ubiquity and tendency to appear in movies with ensemble casts. However, these days we have slightly more elaborate movie databases and software with which to ingest them, and can now figure out a statistic for an actor that measures the network importance of both the actor as well as recursively their own network. So who’s the real center of Hollywood? Samuel L. Jackson, with an eigenvector centrality of 0.091, followed by Robert De Niro (0.09), Morgan Freeman (0.089) and Bruce Willis (0.082). Bacon is ranked No. 64.

Daniel Parris, Stat Significant

Immortals

For a minute there everyone was obsessed with “blue zones,” regions where due to lifestyle, diet and any number of fascinating causes, people were remarkably long-lived. Once we started looking into the secrets of these long-lived people, researchers came to realize that the key thing linking these communities together was “poor recordkeeping and lots of benefits fraud,” or people either pretending to be older than they actually were so as to obtain senior benefits early or not reporting the death of a person so as to continue to receive their social security. Man, I was really banking on “olive oil and light exercise.” Anyway, a new preprint examined data from 236 states and nations and found that the places with lots of centenarians tended to be places with bad recordkeeping, such as Okinawa, Japan, where the birth records were destroyed during American bombing raids and which has conspicuously more centenarians. When Greece audited its centenarians, 72 percent of them disappeared, and when Costa Rica investigated theirs, 42 percent were lying.

Ari Daniel, NPR

Fanfic

Fanfiction is a massive creative output of the internet, with millions of fics published by fans about the characters of massive entertainment properties, niche communities and even real people. One interesting trend over the past several years has been shifts in non-canon (as in, the characters are not in a relationship within the official story fiction) and canon relationships covered by the fanfic on AO3. While non-canon ships typically outnumber canon ships 2 to 1, from 2013 to 2023 that gap has shrunk considerably, decreasing from a 50-point difference to closer to a 30-point difference. One interesting element? In 2024, the slash ships (male-male romances) that make up 78 percent of the content on AO3 are canon just 14 percent of the time and semi-canon just 8 percent of the time. Among straight relationships depicted in fanfic, 63 percent are canon and 13 percent are semi-canon.

Ashley Cai, Florina Sutanto, Jan Diehm and Caitlyn Ralph, The Pudding

Niners

The San Francisco 49ers are very good despite being 2-3. You could say similar things about, say, the Cincinnati Bengals or any other number of squads in the NFL. And while the first couple weeks aren’t necessarily a team’s playoff destiny, they’re not nothing: A team that was 2-3 at some point in the season has made the playoffs just 38 percent of the time since 2021. For the 1-4 Bengals, that is, uh, 0 percent of the time in the 17-game, 14-team playoff format.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

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