Numlock News: October 30, 2026 • Texthip, AO3, Brewers

Oct 30, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Prelude

In a thrilling finish, the Milwaukee Brewers defeated the Tampa Bay Rays in the World Series, providing the first World Series victory in the history of the team. It was a matchup that proved decisively that teams in smaller markets and spending well below the league average on payroll can still compete without arbitrary rules reining in player compensation. Anyway, now Major League Baseball is on to its next big fight: The owners arguing that small-market teams can’t compete at the highest levels and the only solution is arbitrary rules reining in player compensation. Yes, MLB and MLBPA are on an off-season labor relations collision course with the collective bargaining agreement expiring December 1, and the expectations are that it will be a brutal lockout. A hard salary cap at $245.3 million replacing the current luxury tax would force the nine teams above the cap to cut player compensation by $627 million, and a proposed salary floor of $171.2 million would force the 12 teams below it to increase their spending by only $548 million.

Justin Birnbaum and Lev Akabas, Sportico

Alcohol

And, in more bad news for the Brewers, household spending on alcohol in the United States is at a record low, with alcoholic beverages accounting for 0.77 percent of average expenditures in 2025, just $630 per household. The lowest since this state was first tracked in 1984, it surpasses the depths logged in 2020, when the pandemic led to a sharp curb in alcohol spending, accounting for just 0.78 percent of household spending.

Aidan Williams and Redd Brown, Bloomberg

Concentrated Solar

Concentrated solar energy is the strategy of extracting energy from sunlight by using large arrays of mirrors to direct sunlight at a central point where it is turned into heat that can drive generating turbines. While costs fell quickly enough to compete with nuclear power, the costs of photovoltaic panels fell so low that the economics for a suitable solar site made sense to use panels rather than mirrors. A U.S.-based startup called 247Solar is working with India, though, to build a small, one-megawatt concentrated solar plant that’s designed to use fossil fuels if there is a shortfall in renewable generation. A field of heliostats heats ambient-pressure air to 970 degrees Celsius, heating up ceramic pellets the size of a gold ball, which would allow the solar energy to be stored and last long enough to generate power nine to 20 hours after the sun sets.

John Timmer, Ars Technica

Texthip

South Korean young people have pushed the #texthip (#텍스트힙) trend into the mainstream, which emphasizes that the written word is cool. It’s led to a surge in book sales and consumption among young people eager to unplug. According to a March survey from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, on average, 38.5 percent of adults read at least one book in the previous year, but among people in their 20s that figure was 75.3 percent, which defied declines seen in every other age cohort and was actually up year over year. In the first quarter of 2026, purchases of fiction, poetry and drama by people in their teens and 20s were up 13.6 percent.

Thu-Huong Ha and Sohee Kim, Bloomberg

Agriculture

It has been a brutal year for farmers, but don’t worry, it’s not all bad in the world of agriculture, as there are success stories if you know where to look. For instance, poppy cultivation is up 330 percent, and opium production is up 400 percent in Afghanistan, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime — the first major increase in production since a narcotics ban was imposed by the Taliban in 2022. Cultivation is now at 43,000 hectares, up from just 10,000 hectares a year earlier.

The Associated Press

Manx

A new study of Manx shearwaters, which are small seabirds that fly long distances and live at relatively high latitudes, has found that the birds can actually suffer from a version of jet lag after undertaking swift journeys across the Atlantic, with the birds’ body clocks diverging from local time. The birds breed on islands near the U.K. and Ireland and can fly 1,000 kilometers west to mid-Atlantic fishing grounds when gathering food for a chick. They fly in a relatively straight line home, relying on the position of the sun. Based on data from almost 4,000 such foraging runs, researchers found that the flight tracks on especially rapid return flights deviated clockwise when out of sight of land. It’s not a huge deviation — over a 1,000-kilometer flight, they’d have to fly only an extra five kilometers to reach its colony — so it didn’t exert evolutionary pressure through natural selection, but it is neat and is evidence that polar animals might get this kind of circadian rhythm offset over their migrations.

Michael Le Page, New Scientist

Productivity Awaits

Archive of Our Own (AO3) is the large popular fanwork archive and community that hosts a colossal library of fanfiction. On Thursday, the site went down for maintenance, and hours later the Organization for Transformative Works that runs AO3 announced that the site would, in fact, go down for two to four weeks following the discovery of evidence of a security incident. The site hosts 18.4 million works across 82,900 fandoms.

Samantha Cole, 404 Media

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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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