Numlock News: September 26, 2024 • Arctic, Baijiu, Cinnamoroll

Sep 26, 2024

Arctic

In “sentences that at first sound cool but will make you pretty depressed when you think about it,” for the first time ever a Panamax-sized vessel has transited the Arctic Ocean. The Flying Fish 1 is a 294-meter-long ship capable of carrying 4,890 TEU containers, by far the largest container ship to have pulled off the journey. Flying Fish 1 set out from St. Petersburg on September 3 and made its way through the Baltic, North and Norwegian seas, then traveled along the north coast of Russia through the Arctic Ocean, made its way down the east coast of Asia, and finally arrived in Shanghai on September 26, a three-week journey that was previously impassable because the Arctic Ocean used to have enough ice in it to render such a feat impossible. That cut two weeks off the standard voyage through the Suez Canal. It managed to maintain a speed of 16 knots across the entire length of the route, which again, used to be impossible because of ice that humanity has successfully cooked off through an innovative yet terrifying use of carbon dioxide.

Malte Humpert, gCaptain

Hello Kitty

Sanrio is the company behind Hello Kitty, and the company is doing great, making a killing off licensing and selling an increasingly wide variety of cute companions. Sales in the Americas are up 141 percent year over year as of last quarter, and a deal cut with Alibaba means that Sanrio is making a fortune in China. Most interestingly of all, Hello Kitty herself is down from being responsible for 76 percent of Sanrio’s gross profit a decade ago to just 30 percent last fiscal year, a far more sustainable and less top-heavy character merchandising business. Indeed, the company’s top character according to a poll conducted last year is Cinnamoroll, an adorable puppy. The furious red panda featured in Netflix’s Aggretsuko is a big hit, too.

Jacky Wong, The Wall Street Journal

Baby Botox

According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the number of people in their 20s who got Botox increased by 71 percent between 2019 and 2022, a phenomenon known as “baby Botox” both because of the youth of the people paying for the muscle paralytic as well as the smaller size of the dose. The intent of the practice is to prevent wrinkles from ever appearing, and while the kind of long-term studies that could vet that claim are not yet available, the popularity does speak for itself. That’s not all, though: The number of Americans 19 and younger who got Botox also increased 75 percent from 2019 to 2022.

Yasmin Tayag, The Atlantic

Vote

Countries have all sorts of complicated lingering artifacts from the eras of colonization and the creation of nations, whether it’s borders incompetently drawn by the British, poorly designed legislative systems created in direct response to misrule by the British, or even antiquated systems of vestigial weights and measures resulting from the hegemony of, you guessed it, the British. One such albatross around the neck of a promising democracy is a complex system wherein different regions under a democracy get additional electoral power owing to the arbitrary boundaries those regions had upon creation of or admission into a larger, post-colonial state. These can be deeply unpopular, but nevertheless endure, and can lead to all manner of internal strife due to the misallocation of results compared to the overall popular will of a democracy. One example is called “the electoral college,” and Americans still overall really dislike it; the latest from Pew is that 63 percent of Americans would prefer that the popular vote decide the winner of a presidential election, while 35 percent prefer retaining the Electoral College system.

Jocelyn Kiley, Pew Research Center

Megalopolis

This weekend, DreamWorks Animation is releasing The Wild Robot, a highly anticipated animated film with great word of mouth that’s on track to open to over $24 million and will probably end up winning the weekend. However, there is another thing happening at the movies this weekend: Francis Ford Coppola, best known as the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, and as the maniacal subject of the making-of documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse about the fiasco that was producing Apocalypse Now, is releasing a new movie. This script was long considered by the major studios to be a mess, unreleasable, all sorts of impossible things, and hey, turns out they may have been right. Coppola sold a chunk of his winery and pumped the proceeds into Megalopolis, a passion project that cost $120 million before marketing and this weekend is expected to make $5 million to $7 million. I have obviously already bought a ticket, because I believe that when a person has made a heap of all their winnings and risked it all on one turn of pitch and toss, you at least owe it to them to watch the throw.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Under The Sea

Six million years ago, continental shifts cut off the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic, and over the following 600,000 years, water evaporation left behind gypsum and salt, some briny ponds in a landlocked basin, and the extinction of all sorts of ancient critters. Eventually, 50,000 years after the worst of it, the strait opened back up, flooded the landscape and created a fascinating mystery for future generations of geologists as to why exactly there’s a kilometer of salt down there. Anyway, a new study wanted to find out just how bad the end of the first go at the Mediterranean was for the local life, analyzing records of 23,000 fossils ranging from 12 million to 3.5 million years old, and identified 800 species that were once only found in the Mediterranean. Following the salinity crisis, just 86 survived. When the Atlantic regained access, 2,700 species repopulated the sea, but most were newcomers.

Science

Baijiu

Moutai is the top-shelf brand of China’s national liquor, baijiu, and the fortunes of the distilling company are a decent proxy for the overall economic health of China’s wealthy. Things are looking not especially great right now as a real estate slump hits the country: A 500-milliliter bottle of Moutai Feitian baijiu sells for 2,320 yuan ($329) wholesale as of Wednesday, down from over 3,000 yuan back in February. Baijiu is made mainly from sorghum and has an alcohol content of about 50 percent, and is a staple for special occasions and advancing business deals. Moutai is routinely ranked at or near the top of China’s most valuable brands.

Kohei Fujimura, Nikkei Asia

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