Numlock News: March 21, 2025 • Checkerboard, Two-Hit Wonders, Audible Enclaves

Mar 21, 2025

Cattle

Uruguay has been rocked by a national financial scandal: 6,000 investors fell victim to what appears to be a Ponzi scheme when $300 million worth of cattle turned out to never have existed. Three companies have gone into court-appointed receivership specialized in raising investments from patrons in exchange for stakes in large cattle businesses, a massive industry in the country. This kind of arrangement oversees herds of 12 million cattle. The largest of the affected firms, Conexion Ganadera, owed $384 million to investors but only had $158 million worth of assets; in that one case alone, cattle worth $226 million didn’t actually exist. Republica Ganadera was short $70 million and Grupo Larrarte was short $12.3 million.

Ken Parks, Bloomberg

Checkerboard

Because of the unique way that the American West was parceled out, many states have plots of federal land — which can be used by hunters — that are boxed in by private property. The owners of that private land have historically been peeved over a practice known as “corner-crossing”, which is when a hunter will step from one parcel of federal land to another only at the corners of a rectangle. Due to math, this means momentarily stepping over private land. After failing to get a verdict of trespassing against four elk hunters from Missouri who corner-cut near his land, one landowner in Wyoming pressed civil trespassing charges. The highly-watched case would decide the status of the Unlawful Inclosures Act of 1885 and the fate of 8 million acres of corner-locked public lands in the West. In the end, a unanimous verdict from the three-judge panel found in favor of the hunters and unambiguously backed corner-crossing.

Amanda Eggert, Montana Free Press

Mesopotamia

Last fall, archaeologists came across a remarkable cache of 200 clay cuneiform tablets and 60 sealings in the town of Tello in Iraq, which was also the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu. It’s an amazing find, and the tablets include school texts from the training process for scribes dating back to the Akkad period (2300 to 2150 BC), giving insight into what precisely it took to run the first empire ever recorded. The sealings indicate they originated from “Naram-Sin, the mighty, god of Akkad, king of the four quarters (of the world): Lugal-ushumgal, the scribe, governor, your servant,” so, you know, strictly mid-level bureaucrat stuff it seems.

Hadani Ditmars, The Art Newspaper

Two-Hit Wonders

A new analysis dove deep into the phenomenon of the two-hit wonder: those artists who managed to escape the notoriety of being just a one-hit wonder by managing a second popular hit but never really broke out far beyond that. Looking at the Billboard Hot 100 charts from its inception to 2010, there have been 3,271 artists who have landed at least two top-30 hits — one of which made the top 10 but never again pulled off the feat and never actually managed to have a top 10 album. The list, in order of popularity, is full of ’em; the most popular is the artist Gerardo Ortiz, who performed “Rico Suave” ( No. 7 hit) and “We Want the Funk” (No. 16), followed by a-ha with “Take On Me” (No. 1) and “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.” (No. 20). Other major two-hit wonders include Cascada with “Evacuate the Dance Floor” and “Everytime We Touch” (No. 25 and No. 10) and Redbone with “Come and Get Your Love” and “The Witch Queen of New Orleans” (at No. 5 and No. 21).

Chris Dalla Riva, Can’t Get Much Higher

Penny

It sure looks like the penny’s days may be numbered, with 42 percent of Americans saying they support the elimination of the penny, up 8 percentage points in just over ten years. At the same time, opposition to its elimination has plummeted from 51 percent in 2014 to just 30 percent in 2025. The real impediment here is going to be nickels. While pennies are wasteful and cost more to make than they’re worth (three cents a penny), it’s actually way worse for nickels at 11 cents per five-cent piece. The elimination of the penny might cause demand for nickels to spike, which would end up being even more expensive. However, the nickel problem isn’t anywhere near as well known as the penny problem, and so just 26 percent want to eliminate nickels, while 48 percent are opposed. No, the right move is to be decisive here, and when it comes to coinage, work at the level of dimes and dimes alone.

Alexander Rossell Hayes, YouGov

Resale

Renting clothes from large online shops or buying them secondhand and reselling them on online platforms is no longer on the fringes of the retail business. For the youngest consumers, obtaining clothing for just a short time and then sending it on its way has become a real fashion staple. The secondhand clothing market is projected to hit $367 billion over the next four years, well above the $227 billion last year. By 2029, the American market alone is forecasted to reach $74 billion in sales.

Parija Kavilanz, Bagable

Difference Frequency Generation

Newly published research advances the concept of “audible enclaves,” which is when a sound wave is manipulated to only be hearable in a localized pocket of sound. The tech that could make it possible to, for instance, send an audio message to a single individual in a large crowd. The technique uses ultrasound — sound waves above 20kHZ, well above human hearing — as a seemingly silent carrier for audible sound. The technique takes two ultrasound beams of different frequencies individually silent to the human ear and makes them intersect at a specific point in space. At that point, the ultrasound beams generate a new sound wave that is audible to the person in that area. For instance, two ultrasonic beams at 40 kHz and 39.5 kHz create a new sound wave at 0.5 kHz or 500 Hz when overlapping, which is audible to humans. It’s cool James Bond stuff, sure, but oh man, paranoid people are going to have such a bad time with this “voices only you can hear” technology.

Jiaxin Zhong and Yun Jing, The Conversation

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Numlock News: March 20, 2025 • OMNY, Fungi, Mantle

Mar 20, 2025

MetroCard

New York City’s MTA has announced that the final day of MetroCard sales for the subway and bus system will be December 31, after which the reloadable OMNY card will supplant the MetroCard as the primary way to pay for the subway. It’s the end of an era, a 32-year run that itself began by supplanting another iconic subway payment format, the token. According to the MTA CEO, 65 percent of riders have already shifted over to the tap-and-go system rather than the swipes, and the agency said it’ll save $20 million a year to discontinue MetroCard sales. You’ll still be able to use the physical MetroCards through 2026, at which point they’ll reach the end of the line, which I assume is in the Rockaways or something.

Sri Taylor, Bloomberg

Milestones

A new survey from the Pew Research Center found that on average, Americans said that the best age to get married is 26.5, the best age to have a kid is 27.3, the best age to buy a home is 28.8 and the best age to retire is 61.8. While not included in the survey, I can indeed confirm that the best age to delusionally answer a survey is “whenever these people took it,” the best age to have your first global recession is “probably not 19,” the best age to have your second global recession is “probably not 30” and the best age to buy a home is “probably a weekend during fight night at the Bellagio when the state of Nevada requires them to have enough funds in the vault to back up every chip on the casino floor, which is the only time that me and ten friends are gonna be able do what it takes to scrape together a down payment in this economy.”

Jordan Lippert and Janell Fetterolf, Pew Research Center

Fish

For the fifth year running, the Dutch city of Utrecht is operating a fish doorbell on a river lock that is live-streamed for an audience. Organizers will open the lock when a viewer notifies them of a fish waiting to get through. The fish spawn upstream and are interrupted by the lock, which used to be periodically opened to allow them through. However, that meant the migrating fish were susceptible to predators, and to clear the whole misunderstanding up cameras were installed and dutiful viewers could expedite their transit.

Aleksandar Furtula, The Associated Press

Mantle

The mantle transition zone is 410 to 670 kilometers below the Earth’s crust and is believed to contain a lot of water stored in minerals like ringwoodite and wadsleyite. While not very well understood, it’s generally held that water isn’t evenly distributed throughout the mantle transition zone. A new study published in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems notes that some areas of the mantle transition zone that are thought to be the wettest are also where we get weird volcanos — specifically, the ones that pop up in areas without two plates meeting one another, so-called “intraplate volcanism.” There’s a 42 percent to 68 percent correlation between intraplate volcanism and the wetter locations of the mantle, with a stronger correlation when the water has been there for 30 million to 100 million years.

Rebecca Owen, American Geophysical Union

Sports

Expensive travel leagues have supplanted simple extracurricular sports. Leagues are catering to the kids (and their parents) who want them to be among the 7 percent of teenage athletes who will advance to the collegiate level of their sport, bringing in some scholarship money. One effect is that the amount of money spent on youth sports has exploded, jumping from $10 billion in 2010 to an estimated $40 billion in 2024.

Mark Rerick, The Conversation

Motherlode

The China Geological Survey has confirmed a report first published in the Worker’s Daily in January regarding the discovery of what could be the largest rare earth deposit in the world. This deposit would advance China’s already robust lead in the rare-earth element space. The site is in Yunnan, which also contains large deposits of aluminum, zinc and tin. China already controls 60 percent of rare earth production and 85 percent of processing capacity. This deposit could contain 1.15 million tons of key elements such as praseodymium, neodymium, dysprosium and terbium, and could yield 470,000 tonnes of the materials.

Mining.com

Fungi

Antifungal drugs are hard to come by, as fungi tend to resemble healthy human cells a whole lot more than bacterial cells, making it hard to find a chemical that kills a fungus but not our own cells. This is what makes the discovery of an anti-fungal compound named mandimycin so exciting, particularly after a successful trial in mice infected with a drug-resistant strain of Candida albicans. The fungus killed all the untreated mice while mice treated with a four-day 10 mg per kg dose of mandimycin lived. The drug was also effective against Cryptococcus neoformans, which kills 100,000 people with HIV per year, and Candida auris, which became resistant to all drug classes a decade ago. While there’s a long road to go before human clinical trials, promising anti-fungal compounds are rare enough that it is exciting.

Kai Kupferschmidt, Science

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Numlock News: March 19, 2025 • Daredevil, Slugging, Rap Battle

Mar 19, 2025

Experiential Theater

Hypnosis Mic: Division Rap Battle is a new movie out in Japan that grossed an impressive $5 million across just 85 cinemas. The movie comes with an interesting hook: it’s an interactive movie with multiple branching paths that the audience votes on with a mobile phone app. This has attracted lots of repeat viewing — over 30 percent of the viewers return for another go — and each viewing lasts 100 to 106 minutes out of over 5 hours of available footage and 48 different possible versions. The movie tells the story of six battle rap teams featuring some of the leading hip-hop groups in the country. The tech is reportedly not all that hard, with the distributor supplying a small box the size of two PlayStations that gets plugged into the internet and the movie theater’s projector.

Patrick Brzeski, The Hollywood Reporter

NYT Cooking

The app NYT Cooking, the flagship core product of a New York-based gaming and media company, drew in 456 million visits last year. Its YouTube channel’s views were also up 72 percent, and it reached 4.3 million hours of watchtime. Cooking now has a repository of 24,000 recipes and is the No. 1 cooking app on Apple’s app store. It has ascended to the top of the food pyramid (no, not that one) at the same moment that the previous king of the space, Food Network, is beset by declines related to the demise of the cable business model. Cooking has also outpaced Epicurious following its decline. While they publish 75 recipes a month, the classics are the (pardon the pun) meat and potatoes of the enterprise — the most popular recipe of 2024 was a bolognese sauce that’s over 30 years old. It’s the jewel in a crown that contains such luminaries as Wordle, The Athletic and evidently some kind of local daily news.

Hannah Miller, Bloomberg

Campaign Finance

A genie we let out of a bottle several years ago called “campaign finance” has attracted more and more attention from governments eyeing potential reforms. Not the federal one — for god’s sake, don’t be foolish — but in the states, there have been 319 bills pertaining to campaign finance issues across 45 states (and Guam) from January 1 through March. States like New York, Hawaii, Virginia, Minnesota and Arizona lead the pack. Most of the state-level bills are currently pending in legislative committee, but a few have actually managed to advance, including several in Virginia that show genuine promise given the state’s historical disposition toward, say, using campaign funds for personal uses. Many of the bills are about allowing the use of campaign funds for childcare expenses, which has been the case at the federal level since 2018, and hopes to facilitate more parents running for office.

Dave Levinthal, OpenSecrets

Daredevil

The two-episode premiere of Daredevil: Born Again is a hit, the most-viewed Disney+ series debut this year, hitting 7.5 million views in its first five days. That number is a bit less than Agatha All Along but the first-day view time is behind only that of Echo. It’s also impressive because it’s the first truly mature-rated Disney+ series and the first MCU television series since the Netflix era. Speaking of which, the original three seasons of the show saw their viewership pop 153 percent week over week since the premiere. Daredevil, one of my personal favorite superheroes, always gets bogged down in the stuff he’s got going on, making a mess of any adaptation that tries to adapt the entirety of his character. By which I mean, Daredevil is a street-level vigilante, the orphan son of a boxer killed by the mob for refusing to throw a fight, who uses his powers of echolocation and his intense training as a ninja to fight evildoers in Hell’s Kitchen ranging from organized crime to low-level crime and also ninjas. He is intensely Catholic, has a strong sense of justice, and oh right by day he’s a lawyer (I forgot to mention that he’s a really talented attorney) fighting corruption and also ninjas. Speaking of which, he’s most commonly romantically connected with an anti-heroic ninja, also complicated. He predominantly throws down with Kingpin and Bullseye while dressed as a devil (like I said, Catholic) and exploring morally ambiguous themes. Wait, also, he’s blind, I forgot to mention that part, that’s also important. Like I mentioned: the guy’s got a lot of stuff going on, it’s extremely funny when any given adaptation feels the need to cram all of it in there.

Robert Steiner, Variety

Dams

A new study makes the provocative and controversial argument that we may be underestimating the total population of the world — official records have been found to systemically underestimate the actual number of people living in rural areas. The study’s evidence for this claim is data from 307 dam projects in 35 countries completed from 1980 to 2010. It looked at the number of reportedly resettled people in areas displaced by new reservoirs and compared it to major population datasets of those areas. The most accurate estimates undercounted the actual number of people by 53 percent on average, while the worst estimates were 84 percent off. Their conclusion goes so far as to say that the actual world population is significantly higher than the official U.N. estimate of 8.2 billion. However, demographers think the study has erred by misapplying older grid-level population estimates, arguing about the quality of the data, the bulk of which comes from just a few countries.

Chris Stokel-Walker, New Scientist

Slugging

In Washington D.C., starting around the oil crisis in the 1970s, an informal ad hoc system of carpooling emerged called “slugging.” A Virginia driver willing to put up with a few extra passengers commuting into D.C. would pick up some companions at designated areas and avail themselves of the free, speedy H.O.V. lanes into D.C., massively cutting down their commute time. The pandemic and subsequent work-from-home put a damper on the practice, but new in-office requirements have reinvigorated slugging in D.C. This is especially prudent given that the 2024 INRIX traffic scorecard estimated that DMV area drivers lost an average of 62 hours in congestion over the year.

Corrie Driebusch, The Wall Street Journal

Directed

An indictment in the Southern District of New York charges a Hollywood director with wire fraud, money laundering and several counts of transactions from illegal activity related to an alleged ripoff of Netflix. According to the allegations, Carl Erik Rinsch got a $11 million Netflix deal to finish a television series for them but used the funds on personal expenses and investments, which went pretty badly, declining by half. Rinsch then won big in crypto and options trading, spending that cash on Rolls-Royces, divorce lawyers and legal representation to sue Netflix for more money. The civil matter was settled — an arbitrator ruled the director owed Netflix about $9 million last year — but now the criminal matter will proceed. At the end of the day, it could be worse for Netflix; depending on how things go, there could be a true crime series they could soon produce.

Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter

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Numlock News: March 18, 2025 • Othello, Dog Man, Lumon Industries

Mar 18, 2025

Drone Shows

Using large swarms of drones to create intricate performances and displays in the sky is a rapidly growing business, reaching a valuation of $339 million in 2023. The Middle East has a disproportionately large market, accounting for $41 million of that value — the average show in the region costs $112,250 and utilizes an average of 401 drones. The money is good for those who get in on it, with a 76 percent increase in the number of pilots of unmanned vehicles in the UAE, which have applications in mapping and surveying as well.

Amar Diwakar, Rest of World

Othello

The hottest writer on Broadway is William Shakespeare, with the new production of Othello starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal breaking records during its previews. The show grossed $2.8 million last week, more than any non-musical has made in a single week on Broadway. While Hamilton notoriously charged $998 for the best seats during the holidays, Othello charges the eye-watering price of $921 for the first 14 rows in the center orchestra and the first 2 rows in the front mezzanine, which is pretty much unheard of. Its average ticket price during its first week of previews was $361.90, more than double the second-priciest show.

Michael Paulson, The New York Times

Brackets

Warren Buffett has long imparted a wager and probability lesson, offering $1 million in the Berkshire Hathaway company basketball tournament if any of them correctly call the first round of March Madness. This year he’s tweaking the odds — he’s getting old and wants to give someone a million dollars at some point — and announced that the prize will be awarded if an entrant picks the winners for at least 30 of the 32 first-round games. This could happen: in 2017, five entrants correctly predicted the winner of 31, only to miss out on the million by 1. In 2019, out of all the official brackets submitted in the NCAA’s contest, 3,080 chose correctly in 30 out of 32 cases. However, in the upset-heavy 2021 bracket, just one out of every 1,578,469 did.

Karen Langley, The Wall Street Journal

Graphic Novels

The data is in: while the sales of the top 20 graphic novels for adult readers were down 18 percent year over year, kids really cannot get enough of comics. Circana BookScan’s chart of the top 20 kids’ graphic novels in 2024 saw sales up 7 percent year over year. That said, one franchise really is responsible for this business: Dog Man by Dav Pilkey, the writer who accounted for 12 of the 20 entries on the list. The top-selling graphic novel of the year by far was Dog Man Vol 12: The Scarlet Shedder, which sold 1,273,926 copies. This was just over double the runner-up, Dog Man Vol. 13: Big Jim Begins, which sold 664,819 copies in the month of its release. That was followed by Cat Kid Comic Club 5: Influencers, Pilkey, Dog Man Vol. 11: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under The Sea and then at No. 5 The Baby-Sitters Club Vol. 15: Claudia and the Bad Joke, just one of two non-Pilkey comics in the top ten.

Brigid Alverson, ICV2

RTDs

Coca-Cola is continuing to run headlong into the alcohol business and will launch a vodka-based version of Minute Maid lemonade and pink lemonade with 5 percent ABV soon. This will expand the current batch of wine-based Minute Maid Spiked, which has included Blue Hawaiian and Strawberry Daiquiri flavors. Canned cocktails have been particularly successful lately when they actually contain spirits like vodka, not just ambiguous malt beverages with unclear alcohol origins. For instance, Surfside was the second best-selling canned cocktail with spirits last year, seeing 378 percent year-over-year growth. I, for one, look forward to when Coca-Cola just says screw it and returns to its origins — starting adding hard drugs to the soda again and selling it as a cure-all.

Chris Casey, Food Dive

Extended Stay

One interesting niche in the hotel business is dominated by Extended Stay America, a company that offers rooms at substantially cheaper prices than a typical hotel of their size, including kitchenettes for people working temporary jobs in new locations or undergoing life changes. Within the hotel industry, lots and lots of rivals are deeply envious of its success, and the likes of Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott and Wyndham have all attempted to replicate the business. One reason is that ESA’s 700 hotels require way less overhead than your typical hotel. Given the longer stays, rarer check-ins, higher occupancy (8 to 9 percentage points higher than usual) and ability to cut down turn-down service to a weekly basis, a standard 120-room location only needs 6 to 10 employees to operate, compared to hundreds at a comparably-sized full-service hotel.

Sean O’Neill, Skift

Lumon

The fictional corporation at the heart of the hit show Severance is Lumon Industries. As the show approaches the end of its second season and its popularity hits new highs, it’s become a pretty strange moment for the real-world companies that call themselves Lumen or Lumon. The show is successful enough that people visit the soulless filming location at the Bell Works complex in Holmdel, New Jersey, which is really saying something. Companies such as Lumen Technologies (a fiber-optic networking company in Louisiana), Lumen (which makes metabolic measurement devices) and Lumon Dental (a dentist near Detroit) have all been catching stray interest from fans of the program. A glazing company called Lumon even saw 200 job applications for a recently posted position in sales, about 4 times the usual volume.

Katie Deighton, The Wall Street Journal

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Numlock News: March 17, 2025 • Nintendo, Sphere, Illinois

Mar 17, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Sports

Last year, total ad spending on women’s sports jumped to $244.4 million, increased sharply from the $102.3 million spent the previous year — a 2.5 times increase. This comes not only from increased real estate — commercial airings were up 37 percent — but the increasing value of that real estate: dollar volume was up 139 percent in the period. One key engine of that jump has been women’s basketball, as the NCAA tournament final last year had the single largest audience for any basketball game aired on television since 2019.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Streaming Geographies

One strange idiosyncrasy of the music business’ shift to the streaming model is that the worth of a song’s streams depends on where it happens. This means that the nationality of the ear listening can have some pretty significant reverberations for artists, especially artists who come from countries with low royalties but who manage to make it big in other places in the world. The U.S., for instance, has a pretty high royalty rate. If an act can make it big here, they can make bank even if the artists are based in other countries. For example, a Nigerian act enjoys domestic success by drawing from a pot where a Spotify subscription goes for $0.84 per month, but making even a slight appeal in the U.S. or U.K. (where subscribers pay $11.99 a month) means they can make great money and enjoy great buying power with that at home. The buying power is another thing; your standard 0.35 cents per stream royalty gets you 2.8 cents of buying power in Nigeria, 1.2 cents in Indonesia and 0.95 cents in Colombia.

Glenn Peoples, Billboard Pro

Sphere

I met a traveler from an antique land,
who said — “A gigantic, immersive LED Sphere
stands in the desert. Near it, by The Sands,
wait, sorry, I guess it’s The Venetian now,
there’s a concert venue that’s pretty dope,
I think that its builder also owns the Knicks.
It yet survives, but I see it less on Instagram,
like the U2 show was cool but who’s in it now;
And on the newswire, these words appear:
Sphere Entertainment: “quarterly net loss of $126 million
look on my RSN, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing but Sphere remains. Round the decay
of that colossal Wreck, MSG Networks,
forbearance deadlines stretch not far away.”

Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

Seal on a Bedsheet

Illinois voted on a proposed set of new state flags to replace its current flag, which was presumably put together the night before it was due by the parents of whichever guy had to decide on a flag. A long-derided “seal on a bedsheet” flag — or SOB — won after a process of narrowing down the alternatives to 10 new finalists, 2 previous flags and the current flag. The headline news is that the existing flag won with 166,000 out of 385,000 votes. The real news is that if you were specifically trying to not replace your flag, “create a vote where the established well-known flag is up against twelve possible replacements and all it takes is a plurality to win” is exactly how I would design an election to ensure that you keep the flag. Indeed, the proof of dissatisfaction with the current flag is clear, given that 219,000 people voted against it, albeit for a myriad of other options. At the very least, the great state of Illinois has yet again given election nerds another example to bring up in their social choice theory discussions of how not to run an election.

John O’Connor, The Associated Press

Hype Hits Reality

A new survey monitored shifting perceptions around AI in just four months. In a poll taken at the end of November/beginning of December, 26 percent of respondents were hopeful about artificial intelligence, 24 percent were excited, 36 percent were skeptical and just 11 percent were overwhelmed. Well, after four months of this stuff, the bloom is off the rose: 24 percent are hopeful (down 2 points), 19 percent are excited (down 5 points), 44 percent are skeptical (up 8 points) and 17 percent are overwhelmed (up 6 points), which isn’t really the direction you want those numbers to go.

Jamie Ballard, YouGov

Novocaine

A tough weekend at the box office; despite 5 new releases, total receipts came to just $52 million, the worst of the year so far. This pushes year-to-date revenues 5 percent behind 2024 and 38 percent behind where they were in 2019, not exactly what an industry that had circled 2025 as the big comeback year was hoping for. Next weekend Snow White is coming out, so it’ll be the last $50 millionish weekend until probably after August. Winning the weekend was the action comedy Novocaine which made $8.7 million, followed by Mickey 17 with $7.6 million and Black Bag by Steven Soderbergh with $7.5 million.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Switch 2

The release of the Nintendo Switch 2 is poised to be a major driver of gaming in a year that’s already chock full of drivers. Analysts anticipate that Nintendo is going to make a play for the single largest game console launch ever. They anticipate that Nintendo will release the console in June with a first-day launch inventory of 6 million to 8 million units. For perspective, the 2 most recent PlayStations each moved 4.5 million units in their first quarter, and the Switch sold 2.7 million units in its first month. The real question comes down to price, as the new chip in the Switch 2 probably costs $130 to $150, well above the $80 that the Nvidia chip in the Switch cost.

Takashi Mochizuki, Bloomberg

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