Numlock News: September 18, 2026 • Challenger Deep, Countdown, Burger King

Sep 18, 2026

By Walt Hickey

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Countdown

The 12-foot Home Depot skeletons are just beginning to emerge, and that can only mean one thing: It’s basically Christmas. Hallmark has announced its annual Countdown to Christmas programming block, the long-running series of seasonal light entertainment rom-com and mystery films. The outlet has announced that this year, it is releasing 34 new original movies as well as three new episodes of the Mistletoe Murders series. These include future classics such as Mistletoe and Mimosas, Return to Santa, Snow Globe Town, Holiday Touchdown: A Bears Love Story and (in what I can only assume is an attempt to expand the network’s territory into novel religious territory) Eight Nights for Love.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Tired Mountain

A new study published in Science mapped seismic activity in Mount Mantap, which has seen 1,400 earthquakes from 2008 to 2025, increasing in frequency and magnitude since September 3, 2017. That’s an interesting finding because Mount Mantap is where North Korea conducted underground nuclear weapons testing, culminating in the last known nuclear test on September 3, 2017, when a bomb with a yield equivalent to 100 to 250 kilotons of TNT was detonated. This appears to have spelled the end for testing at Mantap, which has joined the cohort of geography known as “tired mountains,” a phenomenon first observed during the Cold War where the ground has become so fractured by underground nuclear weapons testing that it is no longer capable of trapping the radioactive gases from the explosions, which can lead to baseline increases in seismic instability like the kind seen at Mount Mantap today.

Tom Metcalfe, Scientific American

Idol

American Idol will be moving from Hollywood to Georgia, but a new analysis of the show and its rivals has determined that the era of cultural musical relevance for American Idol has long concluded, and that arguably, it peaked with the first season to begin with. During much of the 2000s, The X Factor and American Idol were legitimately capable of minting musical stars, with between 15 percent and 35 percent of finalists going on to score at least one top 40 hit. American Idol’s winners would go on to produce 35 Top 40 hits; The X Factor winners produced 21 hits, The Voice (U.S.) three hits and Pop Idol and The Voice (U.K.) none. While that sounds impressive, Kelly Clarkson was single-handedly responsible for 18 of those hits, and One Direction another 13, so it’s pretty top-heavy, and as we enter season 25, not since season 11 of American Idol has any winner produced a top 40 hit.

Chris Dalla Riva, Can’t Get Much Higher

Medicaid

On January 1, Medicaid work requirements go into effect in the United States as a result of the OBBBA passed by the GOP in Congress, requiring non-disabled adults aged 19 to 64 to earn $580 in monthly income in order to obtain health benefits. A new closer read of the legislation — one from the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, no less — has found a conspicuous loophole in that law, though, finding that, technically speaking, the work requirement would be satisfied if a household had at least $580 in gross gambling winnings, owing to a decision by the law’s drafters to use Modified Adjusted Gross Income as the income definition for the purposes of the bill. MAGI includes sources of income ordinarily excluded from the more typical adjusted gross income, and one example is gambling winnings, specifically gross winnings, not net winnings, which will be important in a moment. Essentially, an individual could hypothetically satisfy the letter of the law’s work requirements by placing a $580 wager on a bet that pays two-to-one and winning. Even more intriguingly, one could technically satisfy the letter of the bill by placing opposing bets — for instance, finding an event with a 50-50 chance, placing a $580 bet on both teams — and even though one must lose one and win the other. Since it’s gross gambling winnings, technically the person would have de jure made a gross income of $580 and satisfied the Medicaid work requirement, even if they de facto break even. The AEI, for some inexplicable reason, considers this a problem and not extremely hilarious.

Kevin Corinth, American Enterprise Institute

Casual Fridays

A new survey found a significant difference in the perception of appropriate office attire between respondents 18 to 45 and those 45 and older. For men, jeans are one divisive point — while 81 percent of the younger cohort thinks they’re acceptable, just 65 percent of the older cohort does — but the real generational split is on T-shirts, which 73 percent of respondents 18 to 45 think are acceptable compared to just 39 percent of those 45 and up.

Jamie Ballard, YouGov

The Kingdom And The Power

Burger King has managed an enviable turnaround, posting Q2 same-store sales growth of 8.5 percent, outpacing the rest of the burger field by nine percentage points and building on a Q1 where they grew 5.8 percent. This is attributed to the success of the Reclaim the Flame program, an initiative of the burger joint to assess what people thought sucked about Burger King and to fix it, a $2 billion effort that overhauled the look and logistics of stores and revamped the menu. It has worked remarkably well and has paid off for franchisees; your typical Burger King was producing $125,000 in profit for its owner before the revamp, but in 2023 and 2024, that popped up to $205,000.

Danny Klein, QSR Magazine

Depth Charges

The Challenger Deep, the deepest stretch of ocean in the Mariana Trench, was surveyed by a Japanese research team using a multibeam echosounder. The goal was not simply to get a new record of the deepest point, but also to explore how that depth estimate can be affected by the observational challenges of trying to measure the seafloor nearly 11,000 meters down. That’s resulted in measurements with state-of-the-art equipment that nevertheless differ by more than 10 meters. On this particular survey, the exact same multibeam dataset, when processed using five different seawater sound-speed models, came in with a depth result that ranged from 10,914 to 10,932 meters. Furthermore, the 2° × 2° beam configuration emanating from the ship — by the time it hits the seafloor 11,000 meters below — is hitting a footprint of 400 meters in the along-track and across-track directions. The study’s estimate came in at 10,927 meters as the depth of Challenger Deep.

Chiharu Hosoya, Research Organization of Information and Systems

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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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