Numlock News: October 27, 2026 • Sinokor, Aurum, Bronko Nagurski

Oct 27, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Hey! Tonight I’m going to be part of the Garbage Day Hallowmeme live show at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, if you’re looking for something fun in New York tonight come on out it’s going to be a great show and there’s still some tickets available. Doors at 6:30.

Sinokor

Rates for very large crude carriers have increased over 1,600 percent this year amid the war in Iran, and WhatsApp messages from shipping titan Sinokor’s brokers to other people in the industry are under a renewed spotlight for the impact that they’ve had on the Baltic Exchange benchmark rate. The oil tanker market’s benchmark price point is TD3C, which is the cost of shipping oil from the Persian Gulf to China. Sinokor has benefited from skyrocketing rates, given that it is the owner of 83 supertankers. Such a fleet would have made $143 million a month on average last year. That monthly revenue has exploded: In July, such a fleet would have made $509 million, $1.4 billion in September, and $2.1 billion in October. Sinokor’s revenue for all of 2025 was $5.5 billion.

Alex Longley, Archie Hunter and Weilun Soon, Bloomberg

FBI: PSA

On October 13, thieves robbed a FedEx truck idling outside of the PSA facility in Santa Ana, California, and, in doing so, took two full pallets (and some of a third) of trading cards that were being transported between their owners and the PSA card grading facility. The FBI is now involved, and more details about the extent of the robbery have been revealed, with 6,451 graded cards stolen, most of which are Pokémon and sports cards. Among the possibly most expensive cards stolen were a 1933 Babe Ruth card and a 1935 Bronko Nagurski card.

Jeffrey Dohm-Sanchez, ICV2

Clean Air

Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, 202 facilities in 29 states and Puerto Rico have been exempted from clean air regulations, among them some of the worst industrial polluters in the country. There are 3.3 million people who live within three miles of at least one of the facilities. These include 71 coal plants, 71 chemical plants, 40 sterilizers, 19 facilities involved in the steel business and one copper smelter. It is the largest presidential intervention in the enforcement of the Clean Air Act since it was signed.

Eric Lipton, Maxine Joselow and Mira Rojanasakul, The New York Times

Fish

Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology analyzed nearly a thousand environmental DNA samples collected along Japan’s coastline, which came to 2,672 samples from 316 locations when combined with previous samples taken from as far back as 2017. Thousands of different fish species appeared in the samples, but what was particularly interesting was the 126 species of fish that were found in places further north than ever previously recorded.

Danielle Ellenby, OIST Graduate University

Translation

A new study published by the Coalition for Language Equity in AI Research looked into how languages other than English, and especially those with non-Latin scripts, pay a significant penalty when it comes to the economics of AI token use. Essentially, AI is more expensive for languages with a smaller online presence. Among the 20 most popular languages on the internet, the most expensive of those languages used 1.5 to five times as many tokens when inputted into an LLM; when the set was expanded to 200 languages, the token gap was significantly higher. For instance, Shan is the most verbose language available in the FLORES-200 language dataset, but it only takes 42 percent more characters than English to express the same thought. Yet, the best-case scenario was 2.7 times as many tokens for even the most equitable tokenizer.

Ananya Bhattacharya, Rest of World

Riyadh

Riyadh Air is a new air carrier that operates out of Saudi Arabia, but thanks to the risks of actually landing at airports in Riyadh, Riyadh Air in fact no longer flies to Riyadh. It hasn’t cancelled the flights, exactly; instead, it’s moved from the Riyadh hub to the Al Qassim airport. This is a 434-kilometer drive away, which now involves a 4.5-hour bus trip overland right after or before the flight.

Deepthi Nair, Skift

Aurum

A new study published in the journal Land describes extensive hydraulic systems used by the Romans to remove gold from the eastern Pyrenees 1,700 years ago, with the researchers estimating that the mining operation displaced two million cubic meters of earth and produced artificial ravines and a 300-meter-wide excavation. This is a sign that Roman mining operations were more extensive than previously known, extending beyond the production centers of Las Médulas.

Mining.com

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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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