Numlock News: September 19, 2025 • Landslide, Shipwreck, Amber
By Walt Hickey
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Fragrance
Total spending on prestige fragrances like perfume and cologne hit $3.9 billion in the first half of the year, up six percent year over year. Interparfum — which makes scents for MCM, Jimmy Choo and Montblanc — reported sales were up seven percent. As we careen toward the holiday season, there’s a bunch of new products coming onto the aroma market. The new trend is looking to be “neo-gourmands,” which are basically dessert-like scents.
Wreck
On Monday, the Wisconsin Historical Society and Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association revealed the discovery of a wreck in Lake Michigan off the coast of Bailey’s Harbor. The F. J. King, a 144-foot three-masted cargo schooner built in 1867 that transported grain and iron ore, went down in a gale on September 15, 1886 — brought down by wakes eight to 10 feet high at around 2 a.m. Everybody survived, which is probably why you haven’t heard a pathos-laden folk ballad about the incident. Researchers have been hunting for F. J. King since the 1970s, and only discovered it thanks to side-scan sonar. The hunt for wrecks has taken on new urgency — the Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association has found five in the past three years — in no small part because invasive quagga mussels have been slowly but surely destroying anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 shipwrecks on the bottom of the Great Lakes.
Todd Richmond, Associated Press
Amber
A new report in Communications Earth & Environment describes the first insect-bearing amber deposits found in South America, with samples discovered at a quarry in central Ecuador. The 60 pieces of amber collected are 112 million years old and provide a glimpse into the forests of the supercontinent Gondwana, which separated from Pangea during the Triassic. Of those samples, 21 contained some kind of fossilized life, including flies, beetles, ants, wasps and a piece of a spider web.
North Sea
A new study of hoverflies found on oil rigs in the North Sea concludes that the bugs are long-distance pollinators. The study found pollen on 92 percent of the 121 marmalade hoverflies that landed on the remote oil rig 200 kilometers off the coast of Scotland. The pollen on the migratory flies came from 14 different plant species. Additionally, study of the pollen samples and wind patterns indicates that many flew in from over 500 kilometers away, carrying pollen from Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands during their June northward and July southward migrations.
VPNs
India cracked down on Pakistani media earlier this year amid escalating tensions between the governments, with Pakistani drama channels like ARY Digital, Hum TV and Har Pal Geo cut from Indian YouTube. The government’s pique has not been matched by fans from the other side of the border, with many Indian internet users adapting to the crackdown by just obtaining a VPN and watching what they want to watch; 43 percent to 45 percent of Indian internet users use a VPN, masking their location and helping evade government censorship. When authorities ordered streaming platforms to block Pakistan-originating content on May 8, demand for the virtual private networks jumped 72 percent. Obtaining a reliable VPN, perhaps something like Private Internet Access (but as long as they don’t keep logs, most brands will do), can be important for anyone in a country undergoing rapidly disintegrating constitutional speech protections and ramped-up government censorship of media.
Quratulain Rehbar, Nikkei Asia
Time Makes You Bolder
Climate change is altering the conventional math around landslide risk, with the northeast United States seeing its heaviest rainstorms come in 60 percent heavier than they were in the 1950s. One Dartmouth study projects that extreme precipitation in the region will increase by 52 percent by the end of the century. In upstate New York — not exactly a geological hotspot — the state geological survey estimates between 100 and 400 landslides occur annually. Landslides are not mapped like floods are; a chunk of remote mountain collapsing after a storm and taking down a swath of trees does not really rack up a bill, so most go unreported. Still, some human habitation is now at risk — the 2024 U.S. Landslide Susceptibility Index stated 44 percent of the land in the U.S. could potentially experience landslide activity.
Jen Schwartz, Scientific American
College
Colleges in financially precarious positions — small, private, heavily dependent on tuition and potentially deeply affected by declining college admissions and fewer foreign students — have been closing around the country to the tune of 80 nonprofit or public institutions since 2020. An estimated 370 private colleges in the U.S. will be forced to fold or merge with other schools in the next 10 years. This is a real problem for the municipalities that host these institutions; not only do they lose hundreds or thousands of students and a professional class of educators, beefing up municipal revenue, but also many cities find themselves as brokers trying to figure out what to do with large academic campuses and the idiosyncratic campus buildings.
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Nice indirect reference to "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald".
P.S. I've always loved that song!
I just started using PIA (Private Internet Access) yesterday. After flirtations with ProtonVPN and others, I found PIA the most cost-effective and with privacy guarantees that matched the best of everyone else. Not a paid endorsement; just a new and satisfied customer.