Numlock News: March 13, 2025 • Whales, Widdershins, Walt Disney World

Mar 13, 2025

Rides

A whole lot of Disney is closed right now, and anywhere from a fourth to a third of Walt Disney World Resort is expected to be shut down at some point this year for maintenance and renovations. There are currently 13 ride closures at Disney World, the highest level in a year and the second-highest level since 2010, excluding the pandemic. Part of this is a pipeline problem. No new rides debuted this year (part of it is deferred maintenance finally catching up with the mouse), but it comes at a bad time because rival resorts are beefing up their offerings and launching new parks. There’s also a key incentive behind the deferred maintenance: parks produce incredible amounts of money — $11.2 billion last year alone, up from $5.1 billion a decade before — and nobody wants to be the guy who messes with that. The Lightning Lane ride reservation system is also a $50 million business, making it a tough-to-squeeze-in maintenance when rides might be booked weeks in advance.

Chris Stokel-Walker, Sherwood News

The Dune Express

The longest conveyor belt in the United States has begun preliminary operation in the Permian Basin, a project intended to expedite the transport of millions of tons of sand to fracking wells. Moving the sand by truck is a long and (at times) dangerous prospect, which prompted the creation of the $400 million conveyor belt to avoid/alleviate traffic and to move the important sand 42 miles between Lea County, New Mexico and Kermit, Texas. It’s not the longest in the world (that distinction belongs to a 61-mile conveyor belt in Western Sahara moving phosphorous) but with a freight capacity of 13 tons, it’s been well received by the industry and its neighbors who no longer need to deal with sand truck congestion.

Julio Cortez and Nadia Lathan, The Associated Press

Widdershins Galaxies

A new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society analyzed the James Webb Space Telescope’s new image of the deep universe and found something a bit weird. It’s generally thought that galaxies rotate clockwise or counterclockwise at about equal rates. However, of the 263 galaxies captured in the image, 105 of them rotate counterclockwise while 158 rotate clockwise, based on our viewing perspective. That’s a pretty unlikely skew if the spin of early galaxies is actually random. While it could be just a random sample that incidentally had a bit of a skew (it happens!), there are other theories at play, namely one that the universe was born rotating starting at the Big Bang, making spinning in one direction slightly easier. It could also mean scientists might have to reconsider the effect of the Milky Way’s own rotational velocity — clockwise and otherwise considered to be a negligible factor when observing other galaxies — on their calculations.

Kansas State University

Tommy John

Baseball has seen a spike in arm injuries, with ulnar collateral ligament procedures — the so-called Tommy John surgery — up 170 percent across the major and minor leagues. The culprit is obviously the fastball. The average 4-seam fastball speed increased from 91.9 miles per hour in 2008 to 94.3 miles per hour in 2024, and the number of pitches over 100 miles per hour increased from 214 pitches in 2008 to more than 3,300 in 2024. That aggregated additional strain adds up, and it is flaying the ligaments of the best in the sport bit by bit.

Jared Diamond, The Wall Street Journal

EVs

All things considered, electric vehicle sales are doing pretty great, with global EV sales up 30 percent and sales in the United States up 28 percent year over year. Some of that is probably Americans looking to get into an EV while the subsidies are good — EV sales were up by 8 percent last year — but EV markets are doing great in the rest of the world too. Germany and the United Kingdom each pulled in 40 percent increases in sales and China logged a 35 percent increase in sales year-over-year-to-date.

Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica

WhaleSpotter

WhaleSpotter is a shoebox-sized device being tested on ships; it uses stabilized heat-sensing cameras to identify evidence of far away whales that may be in the water, and then alerting navigators and captains of the potential whales ahead. This allows them to take action to avoid hitting whales, which is a serious problem on the high seas for both whales and ships, killing thousands of whales per year. The system is on ferries, research vessels and cruise ships, and testing on large container ships has proven promising. Research trials in 2019 spotted 78 whales, and across two dozen installations operating last year, it made 51,000 marine mammal detections. In testing on container ships with long-range cameras, the tech can spot marine mammals up to 6 kilometers (about 4 miles) away.

Ashley Braun, bioGraphic

Avocado, Baby

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed over 1,725 fossilized avocados in Honduras to learn more about the history of the fruity. Avocados are believed to have their earliest appearance 400,000 years ago in Mexico and split into three species over the next several thousand years using seeds distributed by megafauna. After all those large animals went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene, the number of avocado plants fell sharply. However, when humans emerged, things picked back up again, and the new study of 11,000 years of avocados found that humans began domesticating avocados sometime around 7,500 years ago.

Bob Yirka, Phys.org

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Numlock News: March 12, 2025 • Lightning, Saturn, Honk

Mar 12, 2025

By Walt Hickey

If you want to read something fun about the Oscars, I have a post I’m pretty proud of over at the Numlock Awards newsletter, all about how Oscar bait has been replaced by Oscar chum. Last big post of the season, shout-out to all the movie fans who follow the spinoff newsletter.

H-Mart

Korean supermarket H-Mart has been expanding at a steady clip from its humble origins in Queens, with outposts on the West Coast, Canada, and United Kingdom and something like $1 billion in annual sales. It’s got a number of tailwinds in its favor; when it first opened, Americans of Asian descent were 1.5 percent of the population, but today stand at 7 percent, and communities that can sustain an H-Mart have emerged in cities hardly synonymous with longstanding Asian communities, places like Atlanta and neighboring Gwinnett County, Georgia, which has gone so far as to brand itself as the Seoul of the South. It’s not just popular within Asian-American communities either, and has ridden the Korean wave into popularity across demographics, with something like 30 percent of shoppers now non-Asian.

Adam Chandler, Bloomberg

Saturn

In a shocking expose, Saturn has been found to have an additional 128 moons that had previously been unknown, bringing the total number of moons of Saturn to 274. This blows the doors off the rest of the solar system: Jupiter’s got “only” 95 moons, Uranus just 28, Neptune 16, Mars two, and of course Earth is a notorious moonogamist. Most of the moons in the new batch, which was revealed by astronomers in a paper that will soon be published in Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society, come in at just a few miles across, but nevertheless possess the trackable orbits around Saturn that make them bona fide moons. They’re all small and orbit at a highly angled slope and in many cases travel backward around the planet compared to the more established moons, and altogether many are considered to be fragments of collisions with other moons. One subgroup has been named Mundilfairi (after a Norse god) and encompasses 47 of the 128 new moons, which may have resulted from a collision in Saturn’s orbit about 100 million years ago. The discoverer gets to name them, so if you or a loved one has come up with any new gods, pantheons, or mythological figures lately, please get in touch as it really seems we’re liable to run out of gods with this haul.

Jonathan O’Callaghan, The New York Times

Sunshine

Florida has passed California in terms of new utility-scale solar capacity added, building out 3 gigawatts of large-scale solar in 2024, behind only Texas. On the residential side, Florida is behind only California in terms of rooftop installations over the past five years. Even though the state’s only pulling 8 percent of its electricity from solar, there is a bright future for the source in Florida, in no small part due to residential demand for self-sufficient and resilient power generation in a state that has hosted 34 billion-dollar weather disasters in the past five years alone. Even though the state government isn’t exactly going out of its way to get solar online, due to state law municipalities have little control over power plant installations, and any plant with a capacity under 75 megawatts is exempt from review and permitting.

Alexander C. Kaufman, Canary Media

GNX

Kendrick Lamar’s November release of the album GNX has secured its third nonconsecutive week as the top album in the United States, pulling in 90,500 album equivalent units according to Luminate. This information came more than a day behind schedule, as it was a remarkably close weekend, and the animosity between the contenders meant that accuracy was a must: see, Tate McRae’s So Close To What came in with 87,000 units, but Drake and PartyNextDoor’s album $ome $exy $ongs 4 U arrived with 90,000 units, necessitating the additional hours of scrutiny.

Thania Garcia, Variety

Fiction

According to the latest data from 18 international territories in the book market, 16 of them saw big increases in demand for fiction books even if nonfiction sales are stalling or falling. Five countries saw double-digit increases in revenue for fiction in 2024, including India (up 30.7 percent), Mexico (20.7 percent), Brazil (16.4 percent), Spain (12.0 percent) and Portugal (11.4 percent). Social media was cited as a major driver. Meanwhile, nonfiction sales were up in only six regions, and at rate way lower than fiction.

Ed Nawotka, Publishers Weekly

Honk

New York City’s implementation of a congestion fee to drive below 59th Street in Manhattan has been a fiscal and traffic success, but new data shows that it’s had a huge impact on quality of life as well. Complaints to 311 over motorists who honked way too much are down by a staggering 69 percent compared to the same period of 2024 inside the congestion relief zone, as the reduction in traffic has compelled drivers to shut the hell up, I’m walkin’ here.

Jose Martinez and Mia Hollie, The City

SO2

In 2020, a new international regulation required that the sulfur content of ships’ emissions be cut by 77 percent. One reverberation of this, unexpected and potentially unwelcome as it may be, is that cloud cover over the ocean is actually down, and one new finding published this week is that lightning over shipping lanes dropped by nearly half, seemingly overnight, right after the regulations went into effect, declining by about 50 percent.

Chris Wright, The Conversation

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Numlock News: March 11, 2025 • Flares, Pokémon, Sakura

Mar 11, 2025

Ne Zha

Chinese animated film Ne Zha 2 grossed another 274.9 million yuan (US$38.2 million). It now sits at a cumulative US$2.04 billion at the box office, the first-ever Chinese film to do so and surpassing Avengers: Infinity War to become the sixth-highest-grossing film of all time. Interestingly enough, Detective Chinatown 1900 has had a pretty remarkable run of its own at the cinema, good for US$484 million. While it’s obviously been somewhat overshadowed by Ne Zha 2’s record-smashing run, it is still more than enough to be the second-highest-grossing film of 2025 so far globally.

Naman Ramachandran, Variety

Pokémon

In February, out of the top 25 sealed trading card game products on the TCGplayer ranking 17 of the best-selling packs belonged to the Pokémon franchise, up from 14 of the slots back in January. This performance is a level of dominance not typically seen within the trading card business. Pokémon has been squeezing the competition. While Magic: The Gathering grabbed four slots and Yu-Gi-Oh pulled in 1 entry in 6th place (which is typical given the limited variety of products that Yu-Gi-Oh keeps out there). There is a notable absence of Disney Lorcana, the trading card game from Disney which has been bounced from the list entirely. Perhaps this is altogether fitting for the Disney IP to be foundering just after the conglomerate so callously and cold-bloodedly murdered the beloved and iconic character, Fivey The Fox.

Jeffrey Dohm-Sanchez, ICV2

Unagi

A Yale-NUS College team wanted to find out just how often endangered eels ended up on dinner plates, examining 327 individual eel products purchased at 86 retailers in Singapore and running genetic testing to find out the eels’ origins. The European eel is critically endangered and export outside of Europe is tightly regulated. Even so, three of the sampled eels were European. The American eel is less at risk than its European counterpart but is still considered an endangered species. However, with no special protections regarding their export, 217 pieces of examined products were of the American eel.

Yale-NUS College

AO3

The preeminent repository of fanfiction on the internet is AO3, or Archive of our Own, and annual data reports of romantic ships between characters are assiduously compiled annually, helping define the contours of intense fandom. One thing it also reveals is the long-term evolution of AO3 — a website with 8 million registered users, a billion visits per month, good for the 18th most popular website in the United States — and of the gradual shifts in what its users are into. One fascinating shift is the increase in female/female shipping, which has risen from 5 percent of fanfic in 2010 to 15 percent today. Also compelling is the rise of the rest: of the 58,000 fandoms on AO3, more than half have fewer than 10 fics and the top 2.5 percent of fandoms have over 1,000 each. This reveals that lots of smaller, more niche fandoms are still in the vast ocean of fanfic and that the prominent hits (Supernatural, Sherlock, etc) are just the tip of the iceberg.

Allegra Rosenberg, Polygon

Cars

According to annual surveys of new car buyers, those who had positive feelings about the intuitiveness of their vehicle’s controls have fallen from 79 percent in 2015 to just 56 percent as of 2024. This trend is also holding steady for driver perceptions of dashboard displays and screen interfaces. Some problems seem to be the result of over-engineering. Owners of battery electric vehicles reported 0.2 per 100 vehicles having difficulty using their door handles. As of 2020, this figure is now much higher at a rate of 3.1 problems per 100 vehicles.

Joe Pinsker, The Wall Street Journal

Sakura

The Japan Meteorological Corp. is forecasting that cherry blossoms will begin to bloom in Tokyo on March 23, with sakura viewing beginning in Nagoya on March 29, Osaka on March 30 and up north in Sapporo on April 27. This would put this year relatively on time with the previous three decades of cherry blossom opening, a massive tourism draw in Japan. Nationally, Kansai University researchers peg the economic impact of sakura viewing at 1.38 trillion yen (US$9.4 billion).

Chihiro Ishikawa, Nikkei Asia

Flares

Data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows that flickering in the loops of plasma in the sun’s atmosphere — the corona — can often signal the possibility of a large solar flare. According to a heliophysicist at Predictive Science, the loops could be studied. In some cases, 1 to 2 hours’ warning of a solar flare — with 60 to 80 percent accuracy — might be achieved. Flares on the sun’s eastern limb will head away from the Earth, but those on the western limb could very well hit us. A European Space Agency mission called Vigil is due to launch in 2031 and will offer an exciting new angle, giving us a sideways perspective and aiding with the forecast.

Chris Simms, Scientific American

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Numlock News: March 10, 2025 • Crater, Mickey 17, Hurricane

Mar 10, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Mickey 17

The new Bong Joon Ho movie Mickey 17, an elaborate fantasy imagining a world where wealthy elites consider the lives of the working class to be disposable, opened to $19.1 million in North America. In addition to the $34.2 million it made internationally, it is good for $53.3 million globally. That is a pretty good start for an original concept at the cinema and a sign that audiences are still down to come out for weird little movies that are R-rated social satires. If there’s a problem for the distributor, it’s that they spent $118 million on the project. Even so, I think the problem is clearly in the adaptation; the original novel is Mickey7, and it’s clear to me that the addition 10 Robert Pattinsons necessary for this project didn’t come cheap.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

National Hurricane Center

The National Hurricane Center nailed it in the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, according to a preliminary forecast verification from the National Weather Service. The NHC issued 347 forecasts, well above the 1990-2023 average of 325. The forecast track performance was also the best in its history, setting accuracy records at every forecast interval it works in, from 12 hours all the way to 120 hours. There were 34 Rapid Intensification events, double the previous decade’s average, which can be particularly hard to forecast.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Ovechkin

Longtime Washington Capitals player Alexander Ovechkin scored his 886th career goal in a game against the Seattle Kraken over the weekend, putting him just nine goals away from Wayne Gretzky’s record of 894 career goals. According to friend-of-Numlock Neil Paine, he’s projected to hit the record on April 13, but this one is going to be watched very, very closely by hockey fans. As he bears down on the record, one interesting element of the Gretzky-Ovechkin relationship has come forward: a 2016 double date where The Great One encouraged Ovi to begin collecting pretty much everything his stick touches. He started with every single stick and puck he’s scored with over the past three years, collected from officials, and immediately tagged by equipment staff. He also collected a rumored colossal archive of memorabilia from teammates, rivals and more that is said to contain over 200 sticks.

Eric Jackson, Sportico

Athens

Prior to getting the folks together and inventing democracy, the Athenians dabbled in other forms of government, including a stint operating under tyranny, presumably just for giggles and to see if the boot on the neck fit. The tyrant Peisistratos ruled the city-state in the 6th century after numerous exiles and returning with an army and a truckload of silver to conquer Athens. Researchers have analyzed 22 ancient coins that Peisistratos used to pay for his return to the throne, specifically analyzing the lead content for different isotopes that indicate where it might have been mined. Lead can serve as a telltale signature of where in the world metal emerged. They found that Peisistratos got his metal from Spain, France, the western Mediterranean, as well as Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria. Essentially, regime change was only possible thanks to the assistance of some interested outsiders.

Sahas Mehra, Science

2G

While many in the world are getting on to 5G telecom service, hundreds of millions of people worldwide are still relying on 2G phones. They’re cheaper and it’s still the only way to get connected in some places. Big picture-wise, this is a problem because the electromagnetic spectrum is finite and scarce, meaning lots of places want to sell off the spectrum allocated to 2G for more up-to-date telecommunications uses. Vietnam, for instance, permanently shut down the 2G network in November, and did so only by offering 4G feature phones to 2G consumers at the government’s cost. This successfully reduced the number of people relying on 2G from 18 million in January 2024 to 143,000 as of November. While feature phones — the phones that aren’t smartphones — have been in decline, in places like India, 2G phones are still 73 percent of the 55 million to 60 million feature phone shipments in 2024.

Lam Le, Rest of World

Disc Rot

A DVD will remain in working order for 30 to 100 years if properly cared for, but Warner Brothers Discovery has confirmed the existence of a serious problem with the DVDs of its films manufactured between 2006 and 2008. Some titles have begun to suffer from early DVD rot, a phenomenon where the DVD begins to separate away and becomes unplayable. WBD has gone so far as to replace the titles when possible as consumers reach out. The current theory is that all of the affected discs came from one specific facility in Pennsylvania using materials that did not stand the test of time.

Scharon Harding, Ars Technica

Crater

The oldest remaining rocks on Earth formed 3 billion years ago, and are in the cores of today’s continents. Authors of a new study in Nature Communications present evidence of finding something really special: the oldest meteorite impact crater on Earth. This was found in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, revealed by telltale shatter cones and spherules. The rock layer of the crater is 3.5 billion years old, which would make it the oldest known crater on Earth by over a billion years.

Tim Johnson, Chris Kirkland and Jonas Kaempf, The Conversation

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Numlock Sunday: John Adkins on what the Flow win means

We talk to Animation Obsessive!

Mar 09, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to John Adkins, who writes the outstanding newsletter

Animation Obsessive

I love this newsletter, it’s a personal must-read of mine, and last week following the thrilling win for Flow at the Academy Awards I loved the post the Animation Obsessive team wrote about it and diving deep into just why this is such a milestone in the field of animation.

Animation Obsessive

'Flow' Takes the Oscar

Welcome! It’s time for a new issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s our plan today…

7 days ago · 208 likes · 24 comments · Animation Obsessive Staff

We spoke about how the European funding model differs from the American one, why it’s so remarkable that an Academy Award winning movie was made in Blender, and what this means for animation.

John can be found at Animation Obsessive.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

John, thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

You are the creator, author of one of my favorite newsletters. I really love newsletters that come at a place of expertise and dive in relentlessly on some of the coolest stuff in an art form. And you guys do that over at Animation Obsessive. Before we dive into Flow and this year in animation and all that stuff, do you want to talk a little bit about the history of the newsletter and the history of the project as a whole?

Sure thing. Animation Obsessive has been on Substack since 2021. We cover animation around the world and across time with a focus especially on some of the more uncharted waters or unexplored corners. It's partly a research project. It's partly a treasure hunt.

It's a little bit investigative. It's supposed to be inspiring and interesting. It's not just for the hardcore. It's intended to be for anybody who is interested in art and creativity and culture and history and all that stuff.

You've had some pretty remarkable finds. I think one of the ones that I had seen, at least of yours, that went the farthest was you found this gouache color palette that Hayao Miyazaki at one point vouched for. And you can get these behind-the-scenes insights from some really tremendous artists but also in a really accessible way. You have some really cool stuff on there.

Really appreciate it. Yeah, the Miyazaki piece is actually our most popular article of all time; we had no idea that was going to happen. It's just like a little quick guide to how Miyazaki used watercolors and people just really resonated with that. I mean, I'm not sure what else to say.

So, again, you cover animation as a whole. You can view it from a lot of different perspectives, whether it's the evolution of it as an art form over the course of the 20th century. It is a really accessible art form. It's a medium that a lot of people have strong feelings about or at least innate feelings about. It could be a good medium in particular for kids. But at the same time, it can have some really resonant films. We just had the Oscars, and do you want to talk a little bit (before we dive into Flow in particular) about the relationship between the Oscars and animation?

Oh, yeah. The Oscars, they're a bit controversial in the animation world because a few years ago there was the problem of the presenters talking about animation just being for kids. And, there's a lot of people who create animation who only work for adults. They're making serious art films, not to throw kids’ media under the bus, obviously. But there are many, many sides of the animation industry that the Academy doesn't necessarily always let in. Or maybe they nominate them and the nomination is the award, as sometimes people say in the animation world.

But in recent years, the Academy has been diversifying who has a say in the winners of the animation Oscars. It’s international, there's more people who are actually in animation.

And we've seen a little bit of the results of that with some of the recent wins and some of the recent nominations that have been very left field, like Robot Dreams last year. I think a lot of people would never have predicted that they would get a nomination. And in the animated short film category, it's actually been a while since a big studio won that category. And this year, there wasn't even a big studio short nominated. So, yeah, things are shifting. And I think Flow is the ultimate example of where that is leading.

Yeah let’s talk about Flow, which really, I think, got a pretty solid feature, not just from, obviously, the victory, but also you got a couple shout outs during the telecast. There's some really interesting things about the production that I think are worthwhile. Can you just speak about what Flow is, how it got made, and what makes it particularly interesting for fans of the medium?

For sure. So Flow is a wordless film about animals on a boat during a giant apocalyptic flood. It was made by an extremely small team in Latvia and Belgium and France. The director is from Latvia. He's the first Latvian ever nominated for an Academy Award, let alone the first to win. And he's a self-taught filmmaker. His film before this one, he made entirely by himself. It was a feature film that he made in Blender, which is free software. I read somewhere that he made it for like $40,000 or something.

Incredible.

That's amazing. Yeah, it really is. I mean, it's a real incredible achievement for somebody to make a feature film by themselves like that. And the ethos that he started there carried over into Flow. And Flow is a very low-budget film. It costs less than $4 million, which for animation is just outrageous, almost unheard of. Even in Europe, where animation budgets are lower, this was fairly low. The director, Gints Zilbalodis, said that it was a huge budget for Latvia. But in France, where the film was mostly animated, it was actually on the low end.

One of the things that makes this film so different is the animal characters are not anthropomorphized. This is not Disney animation. The animals move in a somewhat realistic way, but also not hyper-realistic. It's very studied from real life. At the same time, their goal is to elevate it slightly. And so you have these animals who move in a fairly realistic way. They don't talk. There's not a single word spoken in the entire film. And yet the film manages to maintain real tension, real emotional resonance. You get a real sense of the characters, even though there's no dialogue. It's also shot in this very unusual way for animation, where there's these very long takes, sometimes up to five minutes, with no cuts. There's this roaming camera that takes you through this world that's being flooded. It's just shot in a very different way than the more traditional Pixar style of cinematography, which is very solid, very classic.

And this one, the camera is just — I think Zilbalodis said that it was like its own character. It really does feel almost like another character in the world with these animals. It’s just a really powerful movie that doesn't necessarily have a traditional story. The story is minute by minute what you're watching, and you're there with the animals reacting to each new thing. For some reason, for 90 minutes, it's just gripping for almost everybody who watches it.

I watched the film, it’s just amazing. The camera, to your point, drew some comparison to video games. It doesn’t have a prescribed plot beat. I also saw the Wild Robot which had some similarities on paper — animals, goals, that stuff. But there were no prescribed plot elements. There weren't scenes in which goals occurred and happened. It felt like it was an attention-driven camera. The camera went where it was interested in going, and you yourself then got interested in it, too. It felt like nothing I've ever really seen, not just in the category, but it felt like in animation in general.

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