Numlock News: October 28, 2024 • Nerds, Noodles, Navy

Oct 28, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Venom

Venom: The Last Dance won the weekend at the box office, with the third and potentially final film in the acclaimed series of romantic comedies earning $51 million stateside and an impressive $124 million overseas. That is a slightly more muted result in North America, where expectations came in at $65 million and the previous two movies opened to $80 million each, but either way they kept the budget pretty reasonable on this one. All things considered, as long as it doesn’t completely run out of fuel, it’s not the end of the world. Overall, this year the American box office is down 11.4 percent off 2023 levels and 26.8 percent down from 2019. There’s nothing especially big coming up, either — studios are avoiding releasing anything else near the election — so it’s not much till Wicked and Gladiator 2.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Nerds

When it was acquired by Ferrara Candy in 2018, the entire Nerds line of candy produced $40 million in sales. The confectioner sought to revive the product, and in 2020 it released a new, bean-shaped gummy coated in the Nerds pebbles, a treat it called the Nerds Gummy Clusters, and the product immediately exploded in popularity and permanently altered the perception of Nerds as a candy. In 2020, sales started hot at $8 million, then jumped to $98 million the following year and have since scaled to $523 million worth of Nerds Gummy Clusters in 2024 so far, and that’s only through October. They are now responsible for 88 percent of all Nerds candy sold.

Suzanne Vranica and Ben Cohen, The Wall Street Journal

Price Tower

Starchitect Frank Lloyd Wright produced one single skyscraper, a 19-story building known as the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, just 45 miles north of Tulsa. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, declared a National Historic Landmark in 2007, and missed being named a Unesco World Heritage site in 2015, an issue that led to its current predicament — namely, two lawsuits involving its current ownership. A local couple had hoped to turn it into a tech hub, but have faced financial difficulties after their company, a blockchain-based gold-backed crypto company, went insolvent. The suits relate to some recent financial decisions — decisions such as “ripping out the custom furniture Wright designed for the building and then selling it off in a desperate bid to pay the ballooning $2 million debt on the skyscraper” — that go against an easement held by the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.

Elena Goukassian, The Art Newspaper

Underground

Following Hurricane Milton, the CEO of Florida Power & Light said that power lines that were buried underground fared 12 to 13 times better than those aboveground, which raises the question of why they’re not just buried in the first place. Utilities in Florida have been burying more power lines underground ever since the 2004-05 seasons, when seven hurricanes caused major outages in the state. Generally, it comes down to money: Over in Wisconsin, the Public Service Commission found that a 69-kilovolt aboveground line costs $284,000 per mile to install, while an equivalent underground line costs $1.5 million per mile to put in the ground. Since ultimately those costs are passed on to ratepayers, they try to pick and choose what gets buried.

Shelby Webb, E&E News

Instant Noodles

The U.S. market for instant noodles has grown 36 percent over the past five years and hit $2.7 billion in 2023, making the U.S. the sixth-largest market for instant noodles in the world. There were 5 billion servings eaten in the U.S. annually, up from 3 billion in 2000, and the number of servings has surged from 13.4 per capita annually in 2018 to 15.2 servings per capita in 2023, with a larger and larger share of consumers keeping instant noodles in the pantry. More of that is also going toward more premium brands, and all these factors are leading several of the companies, otherwise based in Asia, to buy and build factories in the U.S.

Chris Stokel-Walker, Sherwood News

FLIP

The R/P FLIP is a U.S. Navy research vessel, the Floating Instrument Platform, which was specially constructed to do something incredibly funky in the name of signals gathering. It weighs 700 tons and is shaped like a baseball bat, and was basically designed to suck in water at one end and flip the whole structure down into the ocean, so that the 355-foot-long ship becomes a vertical, floating, 300-foot submerged skyscraper. It was commissioned in 1962 and is a great way to study acoustics, wave dynamics and marine life. The vessel was slated for decommissioning until DEEP, a subsea design firm, snapped up ownership. FLIP — technically a barge, not a ship, as it has to be dragged where it needs to go by another boat — is now in France and will spend 12 to 18 months being refitted at a shipyard in Barcelona that specializes in weird projects.

John Konrad, gCaptain

BC

The waters off the coast of British Columbia are notoriously treacherous, and navigating the tempestuous weather patterns can take lots and lots of skill, with winds shifting directions and difficult-to-forecast conditions. The government of Canada operates about 60 weather stations on and off the B.C. coast, but it’s a big coast, and lots of the weather data at any given point is inferred from buoys or weather stations that might be very far away. New entrants seeking to build better forecasting systems, such as MarineLabs, have dropped weather buoys and sensor arrays of their own in an attempt to better understand unique weather patterns and currents and provide additional data for forecasts about that weather, hoping to use machine learning to improve them.

Vanessa Minke-Martin, Hakai Magazine

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