Numlock News: September 16, 2026 • Bumblebee, Ejection Seat, Roman Empire

Sep 16, 2026

By Walt Hickey

The core weekday version of Numlock is and always will be a free offering. That said, this thing costs money to produce and edit, and we don’t hit you with any ads. We’re able to do this — no ads, free for all, something neat every morning — only because lots of readers of this newsletter have chosen to pay to subscribe. They get a Sunday edition!

If you like Numlock, this is the best way to support it, and this week is the best week of the year to subscribe, because we do our biggest discount of the year for one week in September:

Get 35% off for 1 year

Merch

Milkshake retailer Starbucks has diversified into collectibles, with the beverage company’s latest limited-time-offering sculpture depicting Snoopy selling for as high as $200 on StockX, five times the $39.95 that Starbucks charges for the commemorative cup. Yes, while today’s consumers have moved on from the Hummel figurines and bone china of previous generations, commemorative glassware and value-holding drinking vessels will never truly go out of style. Starbucks has instituted a two-per-customer restriction on the Snoopy glass cups, which brings to mind the Bearista incident of last year; that cup continues to hold its value on reselling platforms, still going for around $55, well above the $29.95 MSRP.

Daniela Sirtori, Bloomberg

Ejection

The companies that produce ejection seats for aircraft maintain clubs for the people who have been launched out of an airplane on their equipment: a rumored, secretive group of pilots who have had to ditch. Martin-Baker, a British company that builds ejection seats, contacts ejectees and welcomes them to their club with a membership card, a certificate, a pin, a patch and an enviable necktie depicting the logo painted on the side of jets that warns passengers that the cockpit contains an ejection seat, a prized piece of apparel at air shows. By their count, their seats have saved 7,827 lives since the first successful ejection in 1949. They also offer a custom Bremont watch that retails for $5,000 but is offered to ejection survivors at cost.

Marcus Weisgerber, The Wall Street Journal

All Roads Lead To

The release last year of a sophisticated and detailed map of roads throughout the Roman Empire as of AD 150 has allowed interesting research into the networking of the Roman road system and the engineering behind the early highway. A new quantitative study dove into the details of that digital model, which depicts 299,171.31 kilometers of Roman roads. Researchers looked at how straight they were (pretty straight in general, with sinuosity averaging 1.048, even if major modern roads tend to be even straighter at 1.024 average sinuosity) and how much they inclined (90.57 percent of roads were within the limits of vehicular traffic at under 16 percent rise, with a median slope of 3.88 percent). The ancient roads also often line up with modern ones. Did all roads lead to Rome? In a manner of speaking: The Imperial road network data has 10,516 nodes (intersections and dead ends) and 14,901 edges (roads), and 24 out of 45 provincial capitals were in the top 20 percent of empire-wide weighted betweenness centrality, indicating that even if your road didn’t lead to Rome, it certainly led to their rector provinciae on the ground.

James Urquhart, New Scientist and Nature Communications

Get 35% off for 1 year

B. terrestris

There are about 265 different species of bumblebee in the world, but the introduction of non-native bees can cause serious issues. Non-native bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) are causing serious ecological problems in Chile, where they have caused a significant decline in the population of local pollinators, particularly B. dahlbomii, Patagonia’s only endemic bumblebee, which has seen its population decrease by (per some estimates) 90 percent. Chile approved the adoption of B. terrestris at scale in 1997 as the country attempted to expand its agriculture industry. This affected more than just Chile — neighboring Argentina prohibited the import, but that didn’t matter as Chile’s use of B. terrestris meant that feral colonies have advanced about 200 kilometers into Argentina anyway — and from 1997 to 2022, the country imported 1,633,011 B. terrestris colonies and queens, and producers continue to import tens of thousands of colonies per year.

Jude Isabella and Katrina Pyne, bioGraphic

BORG

A new public health study looked into the BORG phenomenon on college campuses, in which one-gallon jugs are filled with alcohol and mixers into a beverage called a BORG, or a “blackout rage gallon.” The study found that the recipe does, in fact, tend to do the trick, with 98 percent of BORG drinkers interviewed getting buzzed or drunk, 29 percent reporting experiencing a blackout and 59 percent reporting they had said or done something embarrassing. That said, 68 percent reported that they did intend to use a BORG the next year.

Andrea King, University of Chicago

Apples

There are 2,500 varieties of apples in the United States alone, but only around 100 of those are raised commercially, and the apple industry relies on about 15 of them in particular. Any situation where a narrow group of varietals is planted is an invitation for disease, so the industry and the government invest in genetic research into apples as well as work cataloging smaller and more niche varietals of apples persisting in the wild, alone in orchards or off the grid. Sometimes this can lead to an exciting discovery, such as when several specimens of the feared-lost Drap d’Or de Bretagne apple, a varietal once prized in pre-Revolution France, was found in Maine in an area originally settled by French colonists.

Maryn McKenna, Scientific American

Goldmine

A new study looked at electronic waste products exported from the European Union and found that the waste contains significant amounts of valuable metals that are in high demand if they could be recycled more efficiently. The gallium in e-waste would be enough to reduce the EU's import dependency by 40 percent, tantalum quantities were 23 percent of total demand and the amounts of magnesium and tungsten in the electronic waste would be sufficient to replace 12 percent of imported supply.

Nils Pauliks, The Conversation

Thank you to Numlock’s paid subscribers, whose support guarantees this stays ad-free. If you pay to subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! Subscribing is the single best way to support a thing you like to read:

Get 35% off for 1 year

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.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups ·