Numlock News: October 11, 2024 • Kickers, Terrifier, Tea

Oct 11, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

By the way, friend-of-the-newsletter Garbage Day is doing a live show at the Bell House in Brooklyn on October 23 that I will be a part of! Score tickets here!

Tea

Extreme weather across southern Asia has sent the price of black tea sharply upward, with the benchmark auction price of tea in northern India coming in at 260 rupees ($3.10) per kilogram, up 30 percent year over year. Tea is grown in India beginning in February, it’s first harvested from March to May, and then the second, more high-quality harvest comes from May to July. Beyond heavy rains in June that messed with the harvest, a fungus has been afflicting India’s tea plantations and it’s hard to kill off during monsoon season. Harvests in Sri Lanka are likewise down, and the export markets are going to suffer the most — Japan, for instance, gets 60 percent of its black tea imports from India and Sri Lanka. Naturally, the world is cautiously eyeing what Britain will do, given that historically speaking they get a bit fighty whenever the tea supply gets dire. We’re all thinking it.

Machika Suzuki, Nikkei Asia

Weeds

Weeds are winning again, with herbicide-resistant strains emerging from 273 weed species, developing resistances to any of 168 different herbicides, and, more concerningly, developing resistance to 21 out of the 31 known modes of action, which are the biochemical targets of the chemicals that kill the plants. Water hemp, for instance, grows an inch per day or more, and is now resistant to seven classes of herbicides. That’s quite bad, as season-long water hemp can cut soybean yields by 44 percent and cut corn yields by 15 percent.

Douglas Main, MIT Technology Review

Doldrums

A new study sought to find out what causes doldrums at sea, when the wind is nowhere to be found and, at least during the age of sail, sailors had to languish in the increasingly desperate hope they’d catch a gust out of there. Doldrums happen over the Intertropical Convergence Zone, which is where the Northern Hemisphere’s northeasterly trade winds meet and collide with the Southern Hemisphere’s southeasterly trade winds. The general scientific understanding was that it causes moist air to rise and basically makes all the air movement in the area upward (not sailable) rather than in some other direction (we can use a sail in this situation). Obviously, this theory is wrong; all sailors know that doldrums are caused by some offense to Neptune and that they’re being punished by the gods, and must undertake some drastic action or sacrificial act in order to soothe the sea lord’s fury. Well, a new study found that both of these equally good theories are false. After a two-month observation of the Atlantic by 200 researchers from 18 nations called ORCESTRA, the data suggests an alternative hypothesis: that doldrums are caused by sinking masses of air, which is also not particularly useful to people trying to move around the ocean with sails.

Hannah Richter, Science

Putting the Foot Back in Football

Kickers are improving at an unexpected pace, banging out field goals of 50 yards or higher at a game-altering clip. So far this NFL season 29 percent of field goal attempts have been from 50 yards away or higher — double the rate of 10 seasons ago — and even more remarkably, those kicks went in 76 percent of the time. Comparing this to other eras of football is even crazier; in 1974, 5.4 percent of field goal attempts were from 50 or more yards back, and only 13.3 percent went in. We’re just a few seasons away from a reimagining of football back into its true form: essentially, a duel between two kickers and the ancillary 52 people involved in getting them somewhat closer to the uprights.

Andrew Beaton and Rosie Ettenheim, The Wall Street Journal

Terrifier

One unexpected ramification of Joker: Folie à Deux flopping at the box office is that everyone kind of expected it to crush the competition, so all the major studios avoided putting any movie they felt strongly about this coming weekend so as to avoid being killed by the clown. Well, the tables have turned, and a new murderous clown is trying to win the weekend: It looks as if Terrifier 3, a slasher flick, might pull off a massive upset and beat Joker 2, which is staring down a 65 percent drop and a $13 million to $15 million projected box office. Terrifier dropped in 2016, making $419,000 on a budget that was about a tenth of that. Terrifier 2 smashed expectations, making $15.7 million globally on a quarter-million budget in 2022, and the new one looks poised to make anywhere between $10 million and $13 million.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Bug

A new study published in Science Advances describes one of the largest bugs that ever lived, an arthropod with two bell-shaped antennae, two protruding crab-like eyes, and a length anywhere between 8 to 9 feet at maturity. The group, Arthropleura, had the heads of modern-day centipedes and the bodies of modern-day millipedes, lived 300 million years ago, and evidence has been found of their existence since the late 1800s. Listen, everyone is all “maybe Jurassic Park is actually a good idea” and then they fail to consider the 9-foot millipedes.

Christina Larson, The Associated Press

Skyscrapers

Mass timber is a new kind of construction that uses large elements built out of specially treated wood to replace what would typically be concrete or steel in conventional construction. The tallest such building is the Ascent skyscraper in Milwaukee (25 stories) but lots more are on the way. When Ascent was finished in 2022, there were 84 mass timber buildings at least eight stories in height under construction or built worldwide, with another 55 of them proposed. They’re of increasing interest because, first off, they look really cool, and second, with steel and concrete combining for 15 percent of carbon dioxide emissions, wood is a better and more appealing option. Glue-laminated timber up to 50 meters long are used to replace what would otherwise be steel, while cross-laminated timber up to 50 centimeters thick replaces concrete for walls and floors.

Kurt Kleiner, Knowable Magazine

This week in the (unlocked for all!) Sunday Edition, I spoke to Taylor Lorenz, journalist and creator of the newsletter User Magazine. Taylor is a brilliant writer who has spent the past several years covering one of the most compelling beats out there, content creators and influencers — not only how they have managed to amass massive audiences, but also how that success has had major ramifications across culture.

Numlock Sunday: Taylor Lorenz on User Magazine

October 6, 2024

Read full story

After years of writing for some of the most esteemed publications out there, Lorenz made the move to strike out and start her own publication, User Magazine, just last week. We spoke about the transition from legacy media to content creation, the next wave of AI, and the threat that censorship poses to technology. Lorenz can now be found at usermag.co and on all the platforms.

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