Numlock News: October 9, 2026 • Phobos, Infinity, Isaias

Oct 09, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Japan

A travel surplus is the difference between the amount that tourists spend in a country and how much that country’s residents spend abroad. Japan has done rather well on that count recently, given increased tourism, but due to a sharp decline in tourists from China, that number is actually down slightly. From January to August, the surplus is still quite high, hitting 4.45 trillion yen (US$28.2 billion), but that’s actually down 0.6 percent year over year because tourism from China is down 56.7 percent. Overall, foreign visitors hit 27.62 million people.

Jo Ishibuchi, Nikkei Asia

Infinity Vision

The Walt Disney Company is attempting to turn sour grapes into valuable wine by cementing its improvisational Infinity Vision brand as a permanent competitor to IMAX. Essentially, Disney is mad that every IMAX screen in the country will be airing Dune: Part Three on December 18, the same weekend that it will be exhibiting Avengers: Doomsday, after a studio game of chicken resulted in rival studios releasing tentpoles the same day. In an attempt to get some of that premium large format bonanza, Disney came up with the idea of “Infinity Vision,” a screen designation that means a movie screen has a width of 50 feet or more, laser projection and 7.1 surround sound — a standard that 5,500 screens globally meet. Now, the Mouse is attempting to permanently challenge IMAX and is attempting to recruit rival studios — Paramount, Universal, Lionsgate, Sony; basically everyone except Dune studio Warner Bros. — to acknowledge their invented, fake screen designation.

Thomas Buckley, Bloomberg

Hurricane

Isaias has been formally upgraded to a hurricane as of 3:30 a.m. UTC on October 8, making this the latest first hurricane of a season since satellite tracking began, beating the previous record by 27 days. This is generally considered to be the result of a very strong El Niño pattern in the central Pacific Ocean, which has shut off storm activity in the tropical Atlantic.

Jackie Flynn Mogensen, Scientific American

Yamamoto

Dodgers ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto has become one of, if not the most, proficient winners of the MLB postseason in history, with 10 starts and nine wins across his three-year history in the league, resulting in an 88.9 percent win percentage — the highest of any postseason pitcher with more than 10 career starts. There have been just 27 all-time pitchers with eight or more wins in the playoffs. Yamamoto’s playoffs-only contributions to the Dodgers put him as not just the top contributor in a team that includes Shohei Ohtani, but also the best in the MLB.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Television

A new survey from YouGov found that the median household in America owns two televisions. Overall, 14 percent of respondents said that there was no television in their home, 22 percent said there was one and 25 percent said there were two. On the upper end, four percent of respondents indicated there were six or more televisions in their home.

Shinmin Bali, YouGov

Oil

According to the Marine Minerals Administration, 62.9 percent of daily offshore oil production — 1.28 million barrels per day — has been shut down due to Hurricane Isaias, which frankly could not have happened at a more ideal time. Also, 57.4 percent of daily output (1.13 billion cubic feet per day) of natural gas production is now offline in advance of the storm. This means that about two-thirds of U.S. Gulf of Mexico oil production is now offline.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Phobos

Japan’s $350 million Martian Moons eXploration mission will take off from Tanegashima Space Center on October 20, aiming for the Martian moon of Phobos. The goal is to land on the moon twice, gather several tablespoons of material and return it to Earth in 2031. One hope for the mission is settling a long-running question of whether Phobos (and Deimos) are captured asteroids or if they are the consolidated remnants of material ejected from Mars. Either way, something like one percent of the MMX-collected matter will be Martian in origin.

Robin George Andrews, Science

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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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