Numlock News: September 29, 2025 • Asteroids, One Battle After Another, Subtitles

Sep 29, 2025

One Banger After Another

The new Paul Thomas Anderson movie, One Battle After Another, made $22.4 million domestically plus another $26.1 million abroad for a global opening of $48.5 million. That makes it the largest opening weekend for a PTA movie ever. His highest-grossing movie so far, There Will Be Blood, capped out at around $40 million in domestic box office. So, all signs point to the new outing — which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and is already being feted for a long awards season run — being one of, if not his best, performing films ever.

Mia Galuppo, The Hollywood Reporter

SaaSy

CaaStle, A software-as-a-service company that allowed any brand to set up its own clothing rental service, has since imploded amid allegations from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice. The agencies claimed that the company drastically overstated revenues and defrauded investors out of $300 million through forged income statements and falsified audit reports. CaaStle started out as Gwynnie Bee, a clothing rental service. It eventually pivoted to selling the software to become a clothing rental service to other companies as part of the boom in SaaS company valuations, building out websites for other brands and operating the back-end logistics. That said, the fake-it-til-you-make-it mentality veered into fraud when the SEC alleged that the company started faking revenue: starting small in 2018 (claiming $71.5 million in revenue when they only booked $24.9 million) but eventually ballooning to overstating the number 75 times over (when in 2024 they published revenue of $838 million despite only actually booking $11.3 million).

Jill R Shah and Kim Bhasin, Bloomberg

Asteroid Families

Asteroids don’t make a lot of contact with one another; if they were going to collide, they’d probably already done it by now. As a result, there are lots of smaller asteroids that at one point were one big asteroid, and these groups are known as asteroid families since they often continue to stay on the orbital path of their long-exploded parent asteroid. There are a million or so known asteroids in the asteroid belt, and only a few dozen large asteroid families, but that’s going to change thanks to new computational tools and instruments like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. A new paper published in the journal Icarus in August revealed the existence of 63 new asteroid families discovered as a result of new computation, and the hope is that many more are on the way.

Phil Plait, Scientific American

Chicken

This year, Americans will consume 103 pounds of chicken per capita, a new record and about three times the amount of chicken consumed in 1965. Tyson has announced it will be rolling out Tyson Chicken Cups, which are essentially sealed cups of chicken — boneless, lightly breaded boneless, Mini Dino Nuggets and Popcorn Chicken Bites — that are stored frozen and take 90 seconds in a microwave to cook. They can also be taken on the go, which Tyson’s research indicates is a distinct part of the chicken market that has been insufficiently satisfied by existing offerings.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Subtitles

A new survey found that 34 percent of U.S. adults – including, somewhat counterintuitively, 40 percent of those aged 18 to 44 — always or often use closed captions when watching television shows or movies. The accessibility setting has gone thoroughly mainstream, and young people adopting subtitles as the norm is an interesting wrinkle. It seems the primary reason that 55% of subtitle-users cited is wanting to catch every word, which may be more difficult if people are watching something while also doing something else. About four out of 10 survey participants cited that they use them to watch a foreign movie or television show, which does make sense given the recent rise of both anime as well as foreign-language content from South Korea. This is obviously a significant shift from the original reason closed captioning was developed, which is viewers demanding a solution for when they don’t want to hear Cris Collinsworth’s voice during a perfectly good NFL game.

Jocelyn Noveck and Linley Sanders, The Associated Press

Know It All

A new survey asked Americans how much they thought humanity knew about a host of different areas of study. In general, people thought that human knowledge of geography (55 percent said humanity knows “all” or “most” about it), mathematics (48 percent), economics (47 percent), literature (46 percent) and architecture (43 percent) was more sorted out than not. Subjects with more even splits include political science, history, chemistry and engineering. In general, people thought that subjects we know rather little about included artificial intelligence (67 percent said humanity knows “some” or “nothing” about), astronomy (64 percent), paleontology (48 percent), medicine (50 percent) and genetics (52 percent).

David Montgomery, YouGov

Trucks

The next big thing in electric vehicles is electric trucks, and China is handily smoking the rest of the world in the early days of the market. In 2023, there were 55,000 light, medium and heavy electric trucks sold worldwide. With 40,000 of these trucks, China accounted for 73 percent of the market. Last year, Chinese automakers accounted for 80 percent of the 90,000 electric cargo trucks sold. Within China, electric trucks accounted for 22 percent of the heavy-duty market in the first half of the year, compared to just one percent in Europe.

Ananya Bhattacharya, Rest of World

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