Numlock News: October 16, 2026 • Soaring, Inca Empire, Phono

Oct 16, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Cubs

Wrigley View Rooftop is a bar near the stadium where the Chicago Cubs play that has a somewhat decent view of the ball field from the roof. The bar has installed stands and charges $125 to $150 a seat in order to view the games. This incensed the Cubs, which took them to court, and after a multi-year legal battle, eventually won, securing a permanent injunction to stop the bar from selling tickets to view the games and concerts. This week, Wrigley View Rooftop appealed, sending the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. While the case broke for the Cubs in part because of the precedent set in Pittsburgh Athletic Co. v. KQV Broadcasting Co., a 1938 ruling where the Pirates got an unauthorized play-by-play radio broadcast banned, the challenge centers on an even older, even sillier case: the 1886 Detroit Base-Ball Club v. Deppert decision, where the Detroit Wolverines fought a farmer who put seats in his nearby barn that accommodated 100 people and undercut the prices that the Wolverines charged. The Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of the enterprising farmer.

Michael McCann, Sportico

Chromebooks

For years, tech companies worked to get their products into school districts, and while a cohort of educators and parents bristled at the educational impact of making all cognition digital, the tech crowd mostly won the argument, with things like the PSAT now entirely online. Well, there’s been a bit of a recent retreat from the Chromebook-driven educational format, and if anything, the driver of that is the tech companies. Thanks to the memory crunch, it has become very difficult for school districts to obtain the Chromebooks they want at the prices they can manage; a high school in Illinois reported that a Chromebook that cost the school $353 each in 2023 cost $400, then $412, then $427 and today was requisitioned at a price of $508 each.

Victoria Feng, The Atlantic

Antonym of Progress

Congratulations to the current 119th Congress, which has enacted a grand total of 121 laws, the second-fewest of any Congress in four decades. Only the 118th Congress — that was the previous one — passed less legislation, just 106 laws by this point in the term. Only 109 of the bills passed under this Congress were in any way substantive, spending money and the like, with the rest being entirely ceremonial. It is not entirely clear if the lame-duck period is going to be at all productive to get legislation past the finish line, either; while 61 percent of public laws passed in the last Congress were pushed through in the lame duck, given the current projections for the forthcoming election, it’s not obvious that the current minority party would have much incentive to play ball.

Drew DeSilver, Pew Research Center

College Football

College Football Playoff executives are reportedly nearing a deal with ESPN to expand the playoff to 24 teams, doubling the current field of 12 teams and sextupling the number of contenders compared to the initial four-team format. The details are under consideration, but the most important thing and the lodestar of the entire conversation is obviously the education of these scholar-athletes and the critical role that higher education has in producing informed and educated citizens. I’m kidding, the whole point is the something like $325 million for the new games.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Phono V

The table is set for what may be a tense and hard-fought negotiation over the future of mechanical music royalties, as the Phonorecords V proceeding that sets the royalty rate for music over the 2028 to 2032 period goes underway. The previous negotiation, Phono IV, was brief, peaceful and voluntary, but the aftermath has been incredibly controversial; after the agreement, Spotify and Amazon quickly reclassified the Premium and Unlimited plans as “bundles,” which gave them a lower royalty rate for music, a move that the music industry contends cost them $500 million. Either way, everyone is entering this negotiation with knives out. The National Music Publishers Association and Nashville Songwriters Association International want the greater of 20 percent of revenue or 40 percent of total content cost, $2.40 per subscriber and $0.004 per play, which would be a significant increase from the 15.35 percent Phono IV rate.

Kristin Robinson, Billboard

Inca

A number of new dates for archeological sites in the Andes is opening up the window for Inca civilization. Previously, the temporal extent of the Inca Empire was considered to be relatively brief, existing for just 94 years from its founding until the Spanish conquest. The traditional chronology had the Inca conquering what is now southern Ecuador between 1463 and 1471, but the radiocarbon dating of seeds and charcoal found there dated the outpost to between1432 and 1451. More accurate dating has expanded the possible range of the Inca, as previously, the just under a hundred years of existence was narrower than the possible error range of radiocarbon dating.

Lizzie Wade, Science

Thermals

As any Animorphs reader knows, large birds are able to fly long times and distances by exploiting air currents, saving energy and gliding in lieu of flapping. A new study looked at the locomotive patterns of 50 bird and bat species to figure out how much time the animals spent flapping, finding that larger birds tended to spend much more time soaring than flapping, with the proportion of flapping flight decreasing by about two percent for every one percent increase in body mass. Seven vulture species that were studied flew over 4.3 million kilometers, while flapping for only 0.1 percent to seven percent of their flight time, with the trade-off being that the larger soaring birds were more restricted in when and where they could fly.

Swansea University

This week in the unlocked Sunday edition, I spoke to the comics creator Punko at New York Comic Con! She is the creator of the horror comic Stagtown and the ongoing (and personal favorite) fantasy webtoon Cinderella Boy. Stagtown is a psychological mystery horror comic that’s a perfect read for spooky season, I would describe it as Junji Ito-meets-X Files paranoia-infused webtoon. This week was especially exciting for Punko with the release of the first print volume of Stagtown: Volume One.

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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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