Numlock News: May 8, 2024 • Sunscreen, Warhammer, Red vs. Blue

By Walt Hickey

I’m going on my honeymoon at the end of the month and we’ll be having guest writers during the actual anniversary of the newsletter, so we’re starting the annual promo early this year.

Price-wise, owing to the continued impacts of inflation, we’ve had to make some hard decisions over here, and will this year be increasi— nah, just kidding, we’re still $5 after six years, and still just $50 for an annual subscription. But this week in fact you also get a bunch off your first year, so now’s the time to become a paid subscriber and support the newsletter:

Sunscreen

The United States is decades behind other countries when it comes to sunscreen, with nearly all European and Asian sunscreens containing the basic ingredient bemotrizinol. It’s one of the most vetted and safest sunscreens on the market, but it’s not FDA approved for over-the-counter use in the U.S. owing to a 1938 law that classifies sunscreens as drugs and requires them to be tested on animals, rather than the cosmetics they’re treated as in most of the rest of the world. Despite 1 in 5 Americans developing skin cancer by age 70, there is not a whole lot of haste from the feds on the issue, and that’s prompted bipartisan action in Congress to urge the approval. DSM-Firmenich is a Swiss company that makes sunscreen chemicals, and has spent the past 20 years trying to get bemotrizinol approved, spending $18 million in the process. The latest efforts have brought many hope, and the FDA could approve it as soon as 2025.

Michael Scaturro, KFF Health News

Deepfakes

In Chinese homes, it’s common to put up a portrait of a deceased loved one for several years after their death, and a number of companies are attempting to bring deepfake technology to this tradition. For instance, Super Brain will make a digital replica of a deceased relative and install it to an Android tablet in the shape of a photo frame, a service that runs for $700 to $1,400, offering a moving image that speaks words drawn from a database. The company also offers a service where an employee or a contract therapist will video call a customer pretending to be a relative that has died.

Zeyi Yang, MIT Technology Review

Royal Warrants

In September 2022, England’s Queen Elizabeth II died, which means that the two-year grace period for possessors of royal warrants ends this coming September and the new guy gets to list his favorite stuff as produced under the auspices of the royal warrant, allowed to feature the coat of arms and claim production is made by appointment. Under Elizabeth, some 800 products and services claimed the royal warrant. Because this is the aristocracy we’re talking about, currently 39 different brands of drinks — including fully eight producers of Champagne — hold warrants and would indeed like to keep them.

Evan Rail, Vinepair

Red vs. Blue

Tuesday saw the release of Red vs. Blue: Restoration, the final edition of the now-folded Rooster Teeth’s 21-year-long machinima saga filmed within the Halo franchise called Red vs. Blue. It was in many ways the forefront of a format that failed to materialize as well as a trend that has defined an entire era of video content. Touted originally as “machinima,” a portmanteau alluding to the creation of cinema through the use of game engines, Red vs. Blue was genuinely groundbreaking in an era of the internet where animation tools were only just entering the hands of normal people. While the term “machinima” has become anachronistic, it lives on in the Twitch streams of tens of thousands who create entertainment, and in emergent storytelling in social spaces using games like Roblox or Fortnite.

Chris Baker, Wired

Oakland

The Oakland A’s are right in the middle of backstabbing the city of Oakland, having announced their departure for Vegas but phoning it in with a tepid lineup at their Oakland joint until the lease runs out. This mediocre on-field product as well as the vehement contempt for management has sent the A’s attendance to pathetic levels, with the team averaging a measly 6,410 fans per game, the lowest home attendance figure for any MLB team in 45 years. These are truly futile numbers; a Sportico analysis found 553 pro and college teams in the United States that have averaged more fans in home games than the A’s, including every one of the five major men’s leagues, 13 minor league baseball teams, 11 American Hockey League teams, about 200 college football teams (six of them Division II, two of them Division III), three Indoor Football League teams, two college wrestling teams, and even the Triple-A minor league affiliate team of, yes, the Oakland A’s.

Lev Akabas and Eben Novy-Williams, Sportico

Trillion Trees

There are lots of complex, sophisticated ways to meaningfully address the complicated issue of global climate change, and then there are the sure, sounds great, that seems way easier angles that attract the attention and the money despite a somewhat flimsier grounding in reality. Take the effort to plant 1 trillion trees in 10 years for example, which sounds clever on paper: starting in 2020, grow, restore or conserve a trillion trees that otherwise wouldn’t exist in 2030, fueled by a billionaire and the World Economic Forum. Well, it’s not going great; the total number of trees pledged four years in is less than 15 percent of the 1 trillion headline number, there’s very little accountability, and by the partial count only 2.6 billion trees have been actually accounted for, 997 billion short of target, meaning 0.3 percent progress has been made about a third of the way in. The sole paper that provoked the crusade went viral in 2019, but has since received substantial pushback from other scientists.

Sophie Alexander, Bloomberg

Games Workshop

One of the more compelling sectors of the game business is Games Workshop, the company behind the incredibly popular and remarkably profitable Warhammer line of miniatures. Recently the community has been rattled by an announcement that the company plans to hike prices 3 percent to 5 percent across the board, also indicating that prices in Sweden and Norway will be rising 8 percent to 14 percent. Their financial reports are fascinating reading; they made £247.7 million in the most recent half-year, and January’s report indicated that their gross margin on making and selling miniatures is 69.4 percent. After accounting for business operations, they’re working with a truly eye-watering profit margin of 35.4 percent. It’s a hard economy when the same daily 1,000 psykers don’t go as far sustaining the God-Emperor of Mankind as they used to.

Timothy Linward, Wargamer

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: The Internationalists · Video Game Funding · BYD · Disney Channel Original Movie · Talon Mine · Our Moon · Rock Salt · Wind Techs ·

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Numlock News: May 7, 2024 • Broods, Blades, Black Lotus

By Walt Hickey

Supercomputing

The U.S. government’s Cheyenne supercomputer auction has ended, with all 313 TB of ram and 8,064 Intel processors selling for $480,085 after attracting 27 bidders. The 32 petabytes of storage were not included, but given the current prices for the materials you’re still talking a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of parts alone, provided you don’t immediately flood the market with eight thousand processors. Mostly used for weather and climate studies, the 5.34-petaflop system originally cost somewhere in the ballpark of $25 million to $35 million upon construction, with the replacement — an HP machine called Derecho — costing $35 million to $40 million.

Dallin Grimm, Tom’s Hardware

Black Lotus

An Alpha Edition Black Lotus Magic: The Gathering card sold for $3 million in a private sale between Pristine Collectables and an unnamed buyer. This is fascinating news for a couple reasons. First, the card is the only existing copy graded CGC Pristine 10, and second, it completely shatters the top price paid for any such card. The top price at auction for a Black Lotus was a signed artist proof which went for $615,000 a year ago, the top price for any single Magic: The Gathering card was the Post Malone $2 million acquisition of the The One Ring 001/001 card in 2023, and the top price for any card certified by CGC cards is a Mickey Mantle rookie card that sold for $1,253,185.

Jeffrey Dohm-Sanchez, ICv2

Blades

Starting in 2017, Global Fiberglass Solutions began temporarily storing thousands of discarded wind turbine blades at a site in Sweetwater, Texas, ahead of plans to grind them up and make them into palettes or railroad ties. General Electric has paid GFS $16.9 million to recycle about 5,000 blades, which the company went on to pile up in Sweetwater and also at a site in Iowa. Well, last September GE sued them, claiming that the company took the money, the blades, and then shut down. While the blades in Texas languish — the state fined them $10,255 and gave them a year to obtain a permit, a fine which was not paid and a permit which was not obtained until weeks after the deadline, and which was eventually rejected — Iowa has made quick work out of their thousand blades, having the state investigate, determine that GFS never owned the blades, and find another company to recycle them into decking, ceiling tiles and cupholders.

Russell Gold, Texas Monthly

Calculators

Scientific calculators are still very much in demand despite the rising availability in personal computers in many parts of the world, with Casio Computer shipping 23 million of the calculators in the 2022 fiscal year. The vast majority — 90 percent — shipped abroad, particularly to students in developing regions that lack access to the computing power many rich countries have. Despite the ascent in mobile phones and other tech, Casio is in fact projecting an increase in demand, and is pushing for a 19 percent increase in sales by 2025 to 27.3 million graphing calculators. Finally, people all over the world will take these tools to learn to speak that universal language, the algebraic music of the spheres, and overcome the problems, the constants and variables of the world itself: I refer of course to graphing calculator games Jezzball, Lunar Lander, Fast Tunnel and Galaxian, naturally.

Miu Koyama, Nikkei Asia

TVA

The government would like power companies to increase the amount of power generated from nuclear energy, which does not emit carbon and would go a long way in accommodating electricity needs while remaining on target for climate goals. The problem is that it’s not particularly easy to convince a power company to do that. The good news is, the government in fact owns a power company, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which sells power to 153 distributors, serves 10 million people, and owns seven nuclear reactors that provide around 43 percent of its electricity. The TVA would, as a matter of fact, love to build more nuclear energy, but there’s a liquidity hitch. In the 1970s, the government set the overall debt limit for the TVA at $30 billion. Lots of stuff has happened since then, and if it rose with inflation that debt limit today should be $137 billion, but it doesn’t, so it’s not, and it’s still $30 billion. That’s a bit of a handcuff when it comes to making long-term investments in infrastructure — two new Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors in Georgia cost $35 billion, for perspective — but it’s one that Congress can address.

Alexander C. Kaufman, HuffPost

Wild Dogs Cry Out In The Night

A 2019 study argued that two muscles in the eyebrows of dogs only developed during the era when they were domesticated, an evolutionary advantage that was contended to mean that the muscles responsible for “puppy-dog eyes” only emerged when the ancestors of dogs were trying to suck up to their new human companions. However, a new study casts doubt on that, finding that the undomesticated rare African wild dog does in fact possess both a levator anguli oculi medalis as well as a retractor anguli oculi lateralis, the two muscles in question, and therefore can create puppy-dog eyes. Their absence from the original study, which compared domestic dogs with wolves, can be partially attributed to their rarity, with just around 8,000 existing in the wild, down by half from 1997 to 2012. This then provokes the eternal question, if there’s a good boy in the forest and nobody is around to see their cute widdle eyes, does it yes you are, yes you are?

Gillian Dohrn, Nature Magazine

Cicada

While the emergence of cicada broods XIX and XIII will be somewhat brief, we’ll be feeling the reverberations of it ecologically for years to come. We are talking a lot of bugs here: During the swarms, a single acre of land can have over 1 million cicadas on it, which comes out to about 2,700 pounds of cicada in the aggregate. All of them are doomed, in one way or another, and that biomass will almost certainly lead to a substantial increase in the populations of birds that eat them — over 80 species, for what it’s worth — causing a population bump that will manifest across ecological generations, as that bumper crop of birds and rodents leads to a phenomenal year for the things that eat them, and so on and so on. It’s also a great year to be a caterpillar, as all the birds will be so gorged on cicada that they can’t eat all the caterpillars they ordinarily would.

Benji Jones, Vox

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: The Internationalists · Video Game Funding · BYD · Disney Channel Original Movie · Talon Mine · Our Moon · Rock Salt · Wind Techs ·

Yeezys · Armed Forces · Christmas Music · The Golden Screen · New York Hotels · A City on Mars · Personality Change · Graphics · You Are What You Watch ·

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Numlock News: May 6, 2024 • Elk, The Phantom Menace, What A Pro Wants

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Brown Gold

Every winter, elk, deer and moose shed their antlers, and foragers eager for the discarded but pronounced objects engage in a mad dash at the start of the first day of antler collection season in order to get prime specimens. Used as decor, souvenirs, and in some cases dog chews, the remains of the 7,500 elk that winter in the 24,700-acre National Elk Refuge outside of Jackson, Wyoming, are a prized find, in so much demand that this year, for the first time, organizers made the first week open exclusively to Wyoming residents. People will pay $15 to $16 per pound for brown elk antlers — that is, the kind of antlers that are yet to be bleached by the sun. An elk antler might weigh 8 to 13 pounds.

Angela Owens, The Wall Street Journal

Fall Guy

The Fall Guy opened to lower than anticipated box office, as the stuntman action comedy made $28.5 million domestically, shy of the $30 million to $35 million anticipated and well below the $118.4 million that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 made last year in the same weekend. The movie’s got great word of mouth and a solid rating on CinemaScore, so Universal isn’t quite panicking yet. In second place was the re-release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, which made $8.1 million, a bold opportunity to let down a whole new generation of fans.

Aaron Couch, The Hollywood Reporter

What A Pro Wants

Fans of the NBA and NHL, each of which is well into its postseason, have united behind a common enemy: namely, an AT&T ad that is grating nerves and provoking tens of thousands of negative reactions on social media. The advertisement adapts the Christina Aguilera song “What A Girl Wants” and changes it to “What A Pro Wants,” and it’s completely inescapable. First emerging during March Madness, it’s aired on national television at least 473 times in the past week, 106 of which were during ad breaks across national broadcasts of NBA games and 212 times during NHL playoffs coverage. It’s got an estimated 729 billion impressions, not bad for the $23 million AT&T has plowed into the campaign. A ubiquitous ad campaign is a double-edged sword; people who watch an ad spot six times have been found to recall an advertiser 92 percent of the time, but those same people are 48 percent more likely to find the spot annoying.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Poets

Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department moved 439,000 album-equivalent units in its second week of release, an 89 percent drop from week one but nevertheless the best second-week numbers for a record since 25 by Adele, which moved 1.162 million units. Of those units, 107,000 were album sales, with the remaining balance derived from the 428.54 billion streams the album racked up in its second week of release. Proving that the music industry and the charts that define it are extremely healthy, thank you very much, the runner-up was Morgan Wallen’s March 2023 album, One Thing at a Time.

Chris Willman, Variety

Decline By 9

A tricky problem facing educators and parents is the long-feared but little-understood “decline by 9,” which is the phenomenon seen among American kids where the percentage who report reading for fun drops precipitously around the age of 9. According to Scholastic’s research, 57 percent of kids aged 8 say that they read books for fun on most days. Among those at age 9, that number drops to 35 percent, a fairly calamitous decline that is worrisome not only for the people who want to sell kids books. Middle-grade books are an issue, and there hasn’t been a bona fide hit in the arena since Dog Man hit in 2016.

Dan Kois, Slate

E-Waste

The rate at which we are generating electronic waste is increasing five times as quickly as the means by which we have to process it. There were 37 million tons of e-waste generated in 2010 and 68 million tons generated in 2022, but the capacity to recycle increased from 9 tons to only 14 tons over the same period. Electronic waste is a missed opportunity in many ways, as in 2022 discarded boards contained an estimated $91 billion in metals. If recycling rates were to rise, the value of the materials would begin to overcome the cost of recycling them, with the magic number being 38 percent of electronics recycled to break even. At 60 percent, the economic benefit would be $38 billion a year.

Mary Hoff, Ensia

Side-Loaders

In 2022, Waste Management sought to replace 2,000 of its 18,000 collection trucks in service hauling garbage to side-loading trucks rather than rear-loading trucks. So far it’s well on its way, having replaced 800 of the trucks, with a target date of 2025 to finish the job. The side-loaders are much more efficient, and require only one employee, rather than the traditional rear-loaders where there’s a driver and a worker who hops on and off the truck to haul trash into the vehicle’s maw. They’re also much safer, as the dangerous part of the operation is the one where someone has to jump out of a truck onto the street to pick up trash.

Kristin Broughton, The Wall Street Journal

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: The Internationalists · Video Game Funding · BYD · Disney Channel Original Movie · Talon Mine · Our Moon · Rock Salt · Wind Techs ·

Yeezys · Armed Forces · Christmas Music · The Golden Screen · New York Hotels · A City on Mars · Personality Change · Graphics · You Are What You Watch ·

Comics Data · Extremely Online · Kevin Perjurer · Kia Theft Spree · Right to Repair · Chicken Sandwich Wars

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Numlock News: May 3, 2024 • Orangutans, Cocoa, Retinol

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Orangutans

An ape in Indonesia has made headlines as it purportedly produced a poultice. In 2022, an orangutan named Rakus in his early 30s had picked up a gnarly gouge on his right cheek, likely as a result of a fight with one of the other 150 Sumatran orangutans living there. These creatures have been monitored extensively by researchers, resulting in 30,000 hours of observations. Following the fight, Rakus was spotted chewing a strange leaf, applying the pulp to the injury and covering the wound, which went on to close within eight days and healed within a month. That’s cool, sure, but should be worrisome. After herbal medicine, what’s next? Orangutans getting into crystals? Moving to the Southwest and trying to clock an aura? Doing a seance perhaps? Chimps asking your mom what time you were born so they can figure out your moon sign? Gorillas volunteering for fringe, third-party candidates based on name recognition alone?

Kermit Pattison, Science

Watercolor

The original watercolor illustration of the book cover for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is up for auction at Sotheby’s, and is projected to sell for $400,000 to $600,000. It’s an exciting work, as it’s the first illustration of Harry Potter and would introduce the character to the world. Painted by then 23-year-old artist Thomas Taylor, a graduate student at the time, it portrays the character as he’s about to board a rather fateful train. It’s one of several items in a big auction from a collection that includes manuscripts from Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. The first time the illustration was sold, in 2001, it was bought for £85,750 ($107,316).

Lauren Peacock, Penta

Chilly

There is at least 7.4 billion cubic feet of cold storage the world over, 3.7 billion in the United States. Growth in cold storage is projected to increase by 13 percent every year through 2030, and it’s expected that another 10 million square feet of new construction will hit every year for the next decade. Cold storage is crucial for the existence of modern life, and industrial freezers are arguably the most important liminal space in our society. It’s why we’re able to have bananas, grapes, and even fish in any reliable manner, and it’s overwhelmingly controlled by just two companies with 70 percent of the market.

Patrick Sisson, Sherwood News

Skin Care

A new survey tracked the skin care trends of the United States, and found that the most commonly used treatments are pore strips (used by 26 percent of women, 10 percent of men, and 18 percent of adults overall) and retinol (25 percent, 6 percent, and 16 percent overall, respectively), followed by facial rollers (12 percent overall), LED light therapy (7 percent), dermaplaning (6 percent), chemical peels (5 percent) and botox (4 percent). Overall, 25 percent of men used a cleanser on “most days,” compared to 58 percent of women. Most concerningly to me at least, just 9 percent of men and a somewhat shocking 19 percent of women said they used sunscreen at least once per day. Come on people, there is a radiation machine in the sky and we have designed a goop that intervenes; it’s time to defeat the sky venom.

Jamie Ballard, YouGov

Bridge

Chubb is the insurer of the former Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore harbor, which to some notoriety is really in Baltimore harbor these days. The insurer is preparing to make a $350 million payout to the state of Maryland, the first in what is all but certain to be a years-long legal fight for a $2 billion to $4 billion loss. The DALI cargo ship, chartered by Maersk, will probably be on the line for a lot of that, but Chubb’s payment will both hit the upper limit of Maryland’s coverage of the bridge, help tide the Port of Baltimore over given that it’s lost $88 million in tolls, and will also help Maryland in its suits against the owner of the DALI, Grace Ocean Private, and the ship’s operator, Synergy Marine Group.

William Gavin, Quartz

Cuckoo For Cocoa

The price of cocoa has crashed down from its peak nearing $12,000 a ton, and futures have since dropped to $8,115 per ton as of 11 a.m. on Thursday in New York. As it stands, the price of cocoa is down about 30 percent from that record high, but still higher than the longstanding price per ton of more than $2,000, less than $3,000. That’s a sign that many of the commercial firms are just going to wait until next season to buy up cocoa, as well as a sign that the supply situation might actually improve.

Mumbi Gitau, Bloomberg

Ports

Most of the containers originally bound for Baltimore have been redirected toward New York (41 percent of the containers), Norfolk (30 percent) and Newark-Elizabeth (10 percent), but the good news is that port dwell times have been overall pretty flat. Rerouted containers are facing additional days of waiting, but in general there has not been the feared cascading delays stemming from the reroutes. For instance, in New York, rerouted containers are posting a median dwell time of 4.1 days, compared to the otherwise flat dwell time of 2.75 days. In Norfolk, that’s a 5-day dwell time for rerouted containers, compared to a 2.7-day situation for typical containers.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Really great couple of weeks in the Sunday edition! I spoke to Kate Lindsay, who wrote “Why your small goods come in gigantic boxes” for the BBC. We spoke about challenges in the supply chain, packaging philosophy, and some of the latest advances in cardboard alternatives. Lindsay can be found at Embedded.

I also spoke to Christian Elliott, who wrote “Drilling on the Edge” for Science.This is such a cool story, and having had Christian on last year to talk about subsea cables, I was super excited to talk to Christian again about a fascinating bit of science being done at the extremes. Elliott can be found at his website and at the NASA podcast Curious Universe.

Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: The Internationalists · Video Game Funding · BYD · Disney Channel Original Movie · Talon Mine · Our Moon · Rock Salt · Wind Techs ·

Yeezys · Armed Forces · Christmas Music · The Golden Screen · New York Hotels · A City on Mars · Personality Change · Graphics · You Are What You Watch ·

Comics Data · Extremely Online · Kevin Perjurer · Kia Theft Spree · Right to Repair · Chicken Sandwich Wars

Sunday Edition Archives: 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018