Numlock News: October 6, 2025 • Everest, Redbox, Ordos

Oct 06, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Taylor

Taylor Swift’s one-time special, Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, was released in cinemas to commemorate the launch of her new album. It $33 million over the weekend, good enough to be the top-grossing release of the weekend. This is not Swift’s first foray into theaters, with her concert film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour making $261.6 million upon release two years ago. One Battle After Another finished in second place and has grossed $101.7 million worldwide in its second weekend, while other Oscar hopeful The Smashing Machine opened a tad shy of expectations with $6 million. The A24 biopic had (very understandably!) the lowest opening weekend of movie star Dwayne Johnson’s career.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Wasika

In 1817, the wife of the Nawab in Awadh gave 40 million rupees to the East India Company with a condition that the company would compensate the family back in the form of monthly pensions moving forward. While that family no longer rules the region that is now part of Uttar Pradesh in India, a deal is a deal. Family members can still get pensions based on the interest of however much money the East India Company’s successor institutions placed in a bank. It’s not a lot of money; the payouts are not fixed and decrease with each generation. The amounts are getting split among heirs, and it is only based on interest paid out on 2.6 million rupees in a bank in the city. One person who received the pension reported getting nine rupees and 70 paise (US$0.11) per month.

Aman, BBC

Redbox

Redbox, the DVD rental kiosk which imploded following the demise of Chicken Soup for the Soul entertainment, may indeed get a second life, not as a DVD and Blu-ray vending machine but as an intellectual property litigant. Last Wednesday, Grove Street Partners offered to buy the “IP Litigation Assets” of Redbox for $100 million, essentially the right to pursue litigation for copyright infringement. Essentially, internet service providers (ISPs) have been successfully sued for facilitating illegal filesharing, with the music industry getting $1 billion out of Cox in 2019. It’s risky and far from a sure bet, but with net total damages for copyright holders coming out anywhere between $200,000 to $4 million per film, it’s a potentially lucrative risk.

Janko Roettgers, The Verge

Everest

Right now, some 1,000 people are snowed in within campsites on the eastern slope of Mount Everest — the Chinese side of the mountain — and a massive rescue effort is underway. The snowfall began on Friday and intensified. Tents have collapsed from the heavy snows, and some of the hikers are suffering from hypothermia. So far, 350 people have been rescued and moved to safety in the town of Qudang.

Laura Bicker, BBC News

Wool

Australia exports 55 percent of the world’s wool, and China buys 85 percent of the world’s wool exports, so the China-Australia wool business is a crucial one. That said, trade has been declining; wool shipments to China from Australia were valued at $1.52 billion last year (down from $2.3 billion in 2022) as China’s importers began shifting to just-in-time purchases and keeping stockpiles low. That may have been a costly strategy as the price of wool in Australia has spiked sharply in the past two weeks after a conference — the Nanjing Wool Market — sent panic through the Chinese garment industry with news that production would fall 11.8 percent. It also sent the price of Australian wool shooting upward in the fifth-largest weekly rise in the index since 1996.

Shaun Turton, Nikkei Asia

Ordos

So, what you would ideally prefer if you were trying to train a self-driving car is a city that is completely constructed and built for millions, but is actually pretty empty. Obviously, we don’t actually have anything like that, so self-driving cars have mainly been trained in places where city leadership is cool with driverless cars on the roads. China, however, does have a city like that, specifically Ordos — an infamous failure of a construction bubble that popped and seriously impacted the Chinese real estate market. The 2012 coal price crash doomed the town, meaning that 70 percent of the properties were left unfinished. Just 131,000 people live there, with a population density of 25 people per square kilometer in greater Ordos. The city, according to the cargo logistics business, offers ideal conditions for autonomous driving.

Kinling Lo, Rest of World

Space Debris

A new assessment of objects orbiting the Earth ranked the top 50 objects in terms of how concerning they are for causing impacts in Low Earth Orbit. They’re mostly just rocket bodies (88 percent of the top 50), and most of them (34 out of the 50) are Russian or from the Soviet Union. The study looked at how close the objects are for space traffic, how big they are and at what altitude. High-altitude objects can pose bigger risks, as any debris resulting from a collision might remain in orbit for centuries. If all 50 objects could be retrieved and removed from orbit, the overall debris-generating potential in low Earth orbit would decline by 50 percent, and if the top 10 were removed, that decline would be 30 percent.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

If you subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! It’s fun, and supporters keep this thing ad-free. This is the best way to support something you like to read:

Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.

Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture · Romeo vs. Juliet · Traffic Cam Photobooth · Money in Politics ·