Numlock News: September 9, 2025 • Viking, iPod, Catfish
By Walt Hickey
Viking
The cruise line company Viking has operated its business as a deliberate counterpoint to mainstream cruise business operations, and it’s paying off big for them. You typical cruise company wants to get its passengers to stay on the floating hotel as much as possible and to jam in as many add-ons as possible. It is willing to sell cabin tickets at low margins if it means getting another tourist on the boat to drink, gamble and do stuff. Viking’s prices for rooms are certainly higher — $800 to $900 per night for one person, perhaps double the typical fee — but only seven percent of its revenue comes from on-board spending, compared to 30 percent at the majors. The attraction is the cities where they visit, with on-board historians offering a bit of a deeper look into the local municipality rather than, say, a jet-ski excursion. People also seem to love it; 55 percent capacity for next year is already booked, and Viking’s revenue per passenger of $600 is anywhere from double to triple that of the largest cruise companies.
Jennifer Williams, The Wall Street Journal
Clickwheel
The past year has been a mad dash from the video game preservation community in their quest to preserve playable copies of the 54 official iPod clickwheel games that Apple briefly sold in the late 2000s. They had been hunting for iPod owners who had syncable copies of the last couple of titles, and yesterday, with the addition of “Real Soccer 2000” to the library, the archivists accomplished their mission. Now, any owner of an iPod 5G+ or an iPod Nano 3G+ can sync the library to their device offline.
Water
A scientific mission called Expedition 501 sought to extract thousands of samples of what scientists have long believed to be a massive freshwater aquifer under the Atlantic Ocean. It allegedly spans from New Jersey to Maine. Expedition 501 penetrated Earth as deep as 400 meters. This summer, they pulled 50,000 liters of samples out of the ground and have begun analyzing what it is and where it came from, whether it is an undersea groundwater system or somehow water left from glaciers.
Calvin Woodward, Carolyn Kaster and Rodrique Ngowi, The Associated Press
A23a
An iceberg that broke off from the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf in Antarctica in 1986 spent years in waters cool enough to prevent the inevitable melting that besets all bergs deviating too far from the poles. Over the decades, it has intermittently held the title of “biggest iceberg” on several occasions, losing it briefly every now and again to some iceberg that instead careens too far north. The ice is now rapidly breaking up. Despite once being the size of the Hawaiian island of Oahu, it is only around 1,700 square kilometers today, and is sitting in waters well above freezing.
Literacy
The illiteracy rate worldwide has ticked up by 2.2 percent on average from 2024 to 2025, with 773 million people worldwide unable to read at all. According to the new report from the World Literacy Foundation, 2 billion people worldwide struggle to read a single sentence. The report also found that every dollar invested in teaching a child to read yields, on average, a $13 economic return. Singapore has the highest literacy rate, followed by Ireland, Estonia, Japan and South Korea.
Filtered
Cigarette filters emerged in the 1950s, marketed as making smoking less harmful to smokers. That claim is not necessarily proven; in fact, filters appear to exacerbate some risks, such as softening smoke and allowing it to be inhaled deeply. While in general this would just be a debate within the tobacco industry, cigarette filters also have a drastic effect on the environment. It increases litter from smoking by including a tube of non-biodegradable material that is, by some reckonings, the single most littered item on the planet. An estimated 4.5 trillion butts are discarded annually, and 800,000 metric tons of them just end up in waterways. The current draft of a treaty being hashed out by global leaders in Geneva would put cigarette filters in a voluntary or mandatory restricted state. However, advocates who argue they’re not even helping public health want to see that upgraded to an eventual ban altogether.
Jamie Hartmann-Boyce and Jonathan Livingstone-Banks, The Conversation
Catfish
A team of researchers has found that the invasive flathead catfish, native to the Mississippi basin, has not only established itself in the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, but is in fact already the apex predator. The species is at the top of the food chain and completely outcompeting local wildlife. Findings indicate that fatheads had the highest trophic position in the river (a figure essentially describing how many rungs up the food chain a particular animal finds itself), coming in at 3.08. That exceeds the resident fish predators, the smallmouth bass (a trophic position of 2.53, lower than it is in areas not claimed by the flathead) and the channel catfish (coming in at 2.72).
Jeff Mulhollem, Pennsylvania State University, and Ecology
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It’s astounding how people who would never throw a food wrapper anywhere but a garbage bin will toss their cigarette butts out the car window at will.
For some reason, this newsletter title sounds like military code to me 😆 confirmation code V-I-C, I repeat, code Viking-iPod-Catfish