Numlock News: October 12, 2026 • Renoir, Suica, IPEX

Oct 12, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Reckoned

Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning whiffed at the box office, making just $5.5 million. His attempt to recreate the lightning-in-a-bottle success of The Social Network without David Fincher, Jesse Eisenberg or the musical contributions of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross appeared to have missed the mark. Still, what could be a more succinct artistic distillation of the arc of Mark than a single one-time massive success early on that was largely due to good timing and the contributions of long-departed collaborators, a hit that was coasted on for 20 years during which one actually failed to generate a new or interesting product? The winner of the box office this weekend was Other Mommy, which made $27.5 million despite rough reviews.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Renoir

Two Renoir paintings that had been stolen from a museum in France have been recovered, along with six arrests. The thieves cut through a fence of the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer, entered through a window and attempted to steal four Renoirs. Ultimately, they made off with just Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano and Young Woman at the Well in a three-minute heist that yet again rattled France’s cultural institutions, raising concerns about vulnerabilities in the myriad small museums that nevertheless house one-of-a-kind artistic pieces.

The Associated Press

Los Angeles

The Port of Los Angeles processed 1,042,652 20-foot equivalent units of containers in the month of September, which is not only the fourth-straight month of historic volumes but also the single best month in its history, with 23,000 more TEUs handled than the previous high water mark set in July 2025. It had 540,000 loaded TEUs inbound, the best on record, though outbound volumes were soft and 371,000 of those containers were returned, mostly to Asia, empty. In general, the El Niño season is expected to mean more containers diverted to the Port of Los Angeles, as carriers avoid the Panama Canal. And shipping companies are more disposed toward just getting the cargo into the country in Los Angeles and taking the rest over land rather than queueing up near the isthmus for who knows how long. Still, with two-thirds of containers leaving L.A. by diesel-fueled truck, and fuel up 36 percent since February, the economics remain in flux.

Lori Ann LaRocco, gCaptain

Suica

In Japan, many small transactions can be accomplished with smart cards such as Suica. It was originally set up by passenger railway JR East as a fare-paying card but eventually became a financial institution in its own right when Suica became accepted at convenience stores, vending machines and so on. The mascot originally selected for Suica was Penguin, adopted from a children’s book in 2001, and since then, Penguin has become a cultural figure, appearing on the 112.3 million issued Suica cards as well as other merch. The company announced that in March 2027, Penguin would “graduate” and a new character would emerge, resulting in Penguin receiving an outpouring of love and support that combines both the affection for municipal transit (see New York and its MetroCard nostalgia) as well as Japan’s unique oshikatsu fan culture, where spending is worth something like 4.1 trillion yen (US$25.9 billion) a year.

Thu-Huong Ha, Bloomberg

Insta360

The handheld smart camera market in the United States was essentially invented by American company GoPro, but competition from two Chinese rivals in particular obliterated its market share to just three percent globally. Those rivals — DJI, with 73 percent of the market, and Insta360, at 20 percent — are themselves at a crossroads, with DJI’s links to China’s military industrial complex leading to DJI being labeled a national security risk, blocking them from selling new drones and cameras in the U.S. Insta360, which is incidentally also based in Shenzen, has avoided that label, as it only recently entered the drone business through the independent brand Antigravity which was developed with third parties and obtained FCC approval ahead of the foreign-made drone ban. It hopes to move in on the territory that DJI has been forced to cede in the action camera market.

Viola Zhou, Rest of World

PVC

It has been two years since Hurricane Helene swept through Asheville, North Carolina, and one of the most enduring impacts has been the PVC pipes that still litter the French Broad River. Just north of Asheville on the river is an IPEX factory that lost 60 percent of the pipes stored outdoors at the site when the storm hit and the flood came, and years of cleanup have still not recovered all of the pipes along a 70-mile stretch of river. A state grant awarded to MountainTrue in 2025 to clean up the river has been extended through February, as the 50,000 work-hours have not been enough to clean up debris that is 80 percent PVC pipe in some areas. Some pipes are under piles of tangled logs in mounds six meters high.

Tammy Webber and Allison Joyce, The Associated Press

Trading Cards

A new analysis of a sampling of 50 trading card packs obtained in shops in Hong Kong found that many did not disclose the probabilities of winning rare cards, according to a new paper published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions. Only 15 of the 50 packs (30 percent) provided some information about the probabilities of obtaining cards, with 14 percent of packs having probability disclosures, eight percent providing a link to a webpage and eight percent having both, though a closer inspection of those websites found that only one-in-five packs actually disclosed anything about the probabilities involved. Researchers contrast this with other similar products such as digital video game loot boxes, which, thanks to regulation, disclose 60 percent to 80 percent probabilities up front depending on the jurisdiction. Some of the probabilities were legit funny, such as “<1%”. That number is doing a whole lot of work, in one case actually meaning a 0.00012492 percent chance of success, with a card appearing in just one out of 800,512 packs.

Leon Y. Xiao, Science X

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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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