Numlock News: October 8, 2026 • Tortoises, Bunts, Nuclear Clock

Oct 08, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Bunts

In the Moneyball era of baseball, an axiom of the optimized analytics of baseball was that bunting was for suckers, and that in general, teams should not bunt because trading an out (valuable) for a base advancement (less valuable) in the aggregate sufficiently reduces scoring. This has made bunting — and those skilled at bunting — less valuable on the playing field. Well, the thing about Moneyball-style analytics is that it’s an economic system, one where under-valued commodities might be spotted by optimization-seeking teams and thereby exploited. This is exactly what has happened in Tampa Bay, which bunts relentlessly — 134 bunts in 2025, more than anyone in Major League Baseball since 2016 and the most in the American League since 2011 — and had the best batting average in the AL either way. This is partly because bunters got cheap, and the Rays are stingy with payroll at 27th place in the MLB. It also helps that other teams are so rusty at fielding bunts that the Rays are succeeding, capitalizing on pitchers who aren’t really paid to field the baseball anymore.

Jared Diamond, The Wall Street Journal

Congestion

Congestion pricing in New York City had a substantial positive public health effect, greatly reducing the concentration of PM2.5 particulate matter that can irritate airways in the enforcement zone. A new study found lower levels of PM2.5 in 2025 compared to the same areas in 2022 to 2024, with the largest decrease — 2.7 micrograms per cubic meter — in the heart of the congestion zone, at Broadway and 35th Street. In general, PM2.5 concentrations were down by 1.3 to 1.4 micrograms per cubic meter, a decline of 13 percent, tracking with the 11 percent decline in vehicles entering the zone.

Columbia Climate School

Anime

A new NRG survey commissioned by anime streamer Crunchyroll found that in the United States, the percentage of consumers aged 13 to 54 who watch Japanese animation at least weekly increased to 41 percent this year, up from 39 percent. The percentage of daily watchers also increased to 21 percent from 13 percent in 2025. The idea that people age out of anime was rattled by the survey, with 58 percent of viewers aged 45 to 54 indicating that their fandom had intensified.

Sohee Kim, Bloomberg

Calanus

Copepods are a type of crustacean in the North Atlantic that acts as the crucial middle part of the food chain connecting zooplankton to herring and baleen whales, with the small creatures accumulating energy-dense fats from phytoplankton and in turn being eaten by larger organisms. They are described by marine biologists as the anchor of the lipid food web that allows life to survive in the North Atlantic, and they have been in decline because of climate change. We’ve seen some of this before, when the larger Calanus hyperboreus was driven out of the feeding grounds in the Gulf of Maine. But today, the cornerstone copepod population, C. finmarchicus, has gone down concerningly. A 2026 study found that the copepod abundance in the gulf’s zooplankton declined from 96 percent to 87 percent before and after a 2010 shift in water masses.

Lela Nargi, Knowable Magazine

Nuclear Clock

Researchers have reported the completion of the first standalone nuclear clock based on a thorium nucleus, a breakthrough that may help create an ultra-accurate time measurement device. The precision of this clock was tracked over the day and was found to be 10 to the power of minus 15, which is an error of one second every 30 million years. That’s not actually as good as the atomic clocks that researchers hope to improve upon with a nuclear clock, but for a prototype, it’s a great result.

Vienna University of Technology

Seychelles Sum Shells By The Sea Shore

The Aldabra giant tortoise lives on the Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles, and a new population survey puts their population level at the highest figure on record at 183,000 adult and sub-adult individuals. The new count actually exceeds the human population of the Seychelles. The tortoise has rebounded from near oblivion, having dropped to under 1,000 individuals in the 19th century, and their recovery was aided when Aldabra became a strict nature reserve in 1981, rebounding to 100,000 tortoises in the late 1990s.

Louise Vennells, University of Exeter

Side Guards

Side guards are a safety feature for trucks, particularly ones that operate in cities, and the intent is to make sure that any collision with the truck keeps the pedestrian, motorist or cyclist out from under the truck, where the survivability of the crash declines steeply. In New York City, these are simple after-market aluminum barriers that sell for about $2,400. Since the European Union first mandated the side guards in 1989, it saw a 40 percent decline in fatalities; even now, London’s road fatality rate is considerably lower than New York’s thanks in part to the side guards as well as other visibility standards. New York requires that its 28,567 city-owned trucks have side guards, as well as trucks belonging to companies engaged in city projects of $2 million or more, but that only covers an additional 5,600 trucks. Now, advocates want to expand that requirement.

Sophia Lebowitz, Streetsblog

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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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