Numlock News: May 2, 2024 • Konami, Flops, Meteorites

By Walt Hickey

Run, EV, Run

Rental car behemoth Hertz announced it will sell an additional 10,000 of its electric vehicles from its existing fleet, on top of the initial intention to sell 20,000 electric models. It has been a complicated time at Hertz, as the high maintenance costs and depreciation of its EVs have resulted in a $392 million loss in the first quarter on revenues of $2.1 billion. The original plan was to buy 100,000 Tesla cars on the rental car industry’s rebound following the worst of the pandemic. Now, obviously, this is only the second-worst longstanding financial relationship Hertz Rental Car has found itself in.

Jay Ramey, Autoweek

Competition

This week Konami shattered its own record, with 7,443 people participating in the Yu-Gi-Oh! Championship Series Tokyo, beating the previous record of 4,364 entrants in a trading card game tournament, also set by Yu Gi Oh! in 2012. Events were potentially marred by allegations that a prominent player, no less the scion of a powerful corporation, elected to employ considerable resources as well as remarkable elements of magic to trap, indefinitely, the grandfather of a rival contender within a Yu-Gi-Oh card, setting up a complicated but nevertheless rewarding quest into inexplicably Egyptian mythology whereby the rival contender was sufficiently possessed by a ghost to contend with the scion.

Milton Griepp, ICv2

Flops

If you’re in the market, the federal government is trying to sell off a perfectly good supercomputer. With a peak performance of 5,340 teraflops, capable of doing 3 billion calculations per second for every watt of energy consumed, featuring 4,032 dual-socket nodes, with a total of 145,152 CPU cores, with 313 terabytes of memory and 40 petabytes of storage, this baby is on sale. Kit and caboodle, it runs on 1.7 megawatts of power. Yes, my sources confirm that it can sustain up to three open Chrome tabs.

Benj Edwards, Ars Technica

Satellite

The year is 1974, and the goal is space; a reconnaissance satellite, KH-9 Hexagon, ejects a 26-inch-wide satellite and pushes it out to a 500-mile orbit. This extremely expensive item is then immediately lost after its deployment fails, and it goes from being a remarkable piece of technology to space junk. Radars lost it in the 1970s, only to find it again in the 1990s, only to lose it yet again, and now after 25 years the S73-7 satellite has yet again been rediscovered.

Passant Rabie, Gizmodo

Vaulted

Vaulted Deep is a company funded by Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify and McKinsey, and essentially exists to dump enormous volumes of human waste into the ground. Brands are paying Vaulted Deep $58.3 million to push waste downward into deep wells. As part of their deals, the company has agreed to dump 152,480 tons of carbon dioxide by 2027. Already, Vaulted Deep is taking 20 percent of Los Angeles’ sewage sludge and pushing it underground.

Justine Calma, The Verge

Meteorites

So far, hundreds of thousands of meteorites have been found in Antarctica, with scientists collecting some 80,000 of them to date. Antarctica is a pretty easy field to find meteorites, owing to the reality that a whole lot of things have hit there, and the accumulated extraterrestrial rock is a pretty critical mass to facilitate experimentation. The problem is, due to warming, meteorites are melting into the ice faster than ever. A new analysis found that three-quarters of Antarctica’s meteorites will be out of reach by 2100 given current levels of warming.

Meghan Bartels, Scientific American

Veins

The veins on leaves of trees are fascinating in their own right, and may have developed as a result of insects. About 340 million years ago, leaves began to have veins that branched a bunch. Then, 23 million years ago, more complex intersecting paths of veins in leaves developed. In between? Insects, voracious as they are, begin chowing down on leaves, leaving damage that could only be handled by the latter types of leaves.

Elizabeth Pennisi, Science

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Numlock News: May 1, 2024 • Blues, Brakes, Velveeta

By Walt Hickey

Blues

The blues, the musical genre, have had a characteristically difficult time, and have been financially suffering. Now, if there’s a genre that is downright built for such conditions, it’s blues, but the numbers are rough right now for artists. There are glimmers of hope — streaming numbers hit 2.5 billion streams last year, up 41 percent since the 1.7 billion streams in 2020 — but the scattered nature of the genre and the wide number of small artists means that your typical blues musician is not benefiting from the transition to streaming, and lesser-known artists would kill for a chance to make a deal at the crossroads under the current economic conditions besetting the genre.

Steve Knopper, Billboard

Velveeta

Not quite cheese, not quite not, the notorious rectangular prism that is Velveeta is a keystone ingredient in many American dishes, though the less said about what precisely the processed cheese product is, the better. Me and Velveeta go way back — my childhood home claims Velveeta as its core innovation — but Kraft Heinz has big plans for the substance beyond mixing it with pasta shells and emulsifying mac and cheese. As the person from the Los Alamos of Velveeta — and it’s left as an exercise to the reader as to whether nuclear weapons or processed cheese product has had a more profound impact on the trajectory of the American experiment — it comes as a shock that Velveeta is launching queso formulas in jars, so if the block is unsettling now you can dabble in near-cheese in a charming jar, where cheese-adjacent material has long dwelled. According to the company, they moved 125 million pounds of Velveeta loaf last year, which the company said can serve 20 people in a sitting.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Paramount

Cable company Spectrum is down to the wire with Paramount over the fate of a number of cable channels, as Spectrum wants to drop several of the less popular channels and bundle more streaming services. For instance, MTV2, MTV Classic and other MTVs beyond the main fixture are on the table, with MTV2 securing just 48,000 viewers on average during prime time in 2023, down 13 percent year over year. In fairness, where else can you find a different episode of Ridiculousness playing at the same time as the episode of Ridiculousness currently airing on MTV? It’s a pickle. Other networks in peril are BET Her (which averaged 41,000 viewers in prime time), BET Hip-Hop and BET Soul.

Luke Bouma, Cord Cutters News

Mask

Razer, the gaming equipment company, came out with a device in October of 2021 that purported to offer users similar capabilities as an N95 respirator, claiming that the Zephyr unit and its filters were FDA-registered, lab-tested, and offered better protection than cloth masks. As we all recall, October 2021 was a pretty interesting time in everyone’s lives, and these claims found purchase, with the company making over $1 million for their efforts. Much of those claims turned out to not be true, and a third-party test found that it reached a maximum PFE level of 86.3 percent with the fans on, a figure that is considerably lower than the 95 percent advertised. This led to an extensive complaint from the FTC, and this week resulted in a $1,171,254.33 proposed settlement that would claw back every dime of revenue made from the Zephyr, plus a $100,000 civil penalty.

Scharon Harding, Ars Technica

Fall Guy

The Fall Guy, the excellent new feature from Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, is projected to earn over $30 million this weekend to kick off the summer box office, with the Barbenheimer pair hoping to potentially open to $35 million to $40 million. It was a pricy flick — $130 million budget — but the movie is opening well internationally, and may benefit from positive buzz. Among its challengers will be Challengers, but a real fascination will be the re-release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, which is counting on a combination of nostalgia as well as a total lack of memory regarding the actual quality of that film. That said, I’d watch the pod race on the big screen for $15, no question.

Brent Lang, Variety

Nearsighted

In 2000, 23 percent of the global population was nearsighted, a figure that is projected to rise to 50 percent of the global population by 2050 given current trends. That carries a massive health care cost. In the United States, spending on contacts, eye tests, glasses and related expenses is as high as $7.2 billion per year, and the global rise of myopia is only projected to fuel that. Studies have linked myopia to a lack of time spent outdoors, with one paper finding that studies pegged the odds of myopia decreasing with every hour spent outdoors per week.

Andrew Herbert, The Conversation

Automatic

A new rule finalized Monday by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration will require automatic emergency brakes in all cars sold in the U.S. by 2029, which would kick in when the vehicle detects an oncoming crash with another vehicle or a pedestrian in front of the car. The projection from the NHTSA forecasts that it will prevent 360 deaths and at least 24,000 injuries every year. The total cost of implementing the rule is projected to be $354 million in 2020 dollars.

William Galvin, Quartz

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Numlock News: April 30, 2024 • Kansai, Domino's, Dodecahedrons

By Walt Hickey

Domino’s

Domino’s sells about 1.5 million pizzas every day, and it’s become more and more profitable owing to a number of deals struck with third-party delivery companies and an emphasis on carryout. Same-store sales are up 5.6 percent year over year. As of last year, your average Domino’s location was putting up $162,000 in profit for a franchisee for the year, up from $139,000 in 2022, and poised to track up to $170,000.

Ben Coley, QSR Magazine

FCC

The Federal Communications Commission has fined the big three wireless carriers in the United States $196 million for sharing customer data without user consent, a scandal that was revealed in 2018. The fine was first proposed in 2020, and then finalized today. T-Mobile was hit with an $80.1 million fine, AT&T with a $57.3 million fine and Verizon with a $46.9 million fine, and T-Mobile is also on the hook for a $12.2 million fine owed by Sprint, which was bought by T-Mobile just after the penalties were proposed. The vote to finalize the penalties was 3-2.

Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica

Bags

The world’s airline companies mishandled an average of 7.6 pieces of baggage per 1,000 passengers in 2022, a seemingly inevitable challenge to adequately loading, stowing and transporting millions of bags. However, perfection is indeed possible, as seen by Japan’s Kansai Airport, which has not lost a single item of baggage in 30 years since it opened in September 1994. That’s thanks to an incredibly efficient loading and unloading process and, despite handling 10 million baggage items in 2023, a pretty high level of perfection. Now, I’m certainly not ruling out the possibility that Kansai is pulling some sort of “nobody dies at Disneyland” myth maintenance by dragging unattended or lost luggage out to the parking lot before promptly misplacing it, but I must concede that’s somewhat more elaborate than the straightforward answer.

Chihiro Matsutomi, Nikkei Asia

Moon

China has revealed a key result of the Chang’e-1 mission, which surveyed the moon from 2007 to 2009, producing the Geologic Atlas of the Lunar Globe, which doubled the resolution of the Apollo-era maps. It took over a decade to make, reveals 12,341 craters, 81 basins and 17 types of rock, and was made at a scale of 1:2,500,000, twice the resolution of the 1:5,000,000 map produced by USGS using data from the Apollo missions.

Ling Xin, Nature Magazine

Roll For Initiative

A Roman artifact found in the United Kingdom near Lincoln in 2023 will go on public display, a remarkable and mysterious object that takes the form of a metallic dodecahedron, a 12-sided object which is about 3 inches tall and weighs 8 ounces. It’s one of 33 dodecahedrons found in Britain, and is believed to have been buried 1,700 years ago. Some think the dodecahedrons served some kind of religious function, others consider it could have been a proof of concept made by smiths to articulate skill, and yet others make Dungeons & Dragons 5e jokes and wonder if it’s inappropriate to compare first-century Britons to the barbarian class.

David McKenna, BBC News

Goldfish

Campbell Soup’s Goldfish crisps are a billion-dollar snack business, and is a major priority for the company. They’ve been the subject of countless limited time offerings in the past four years, moving well beyond the basic cheddar and pretzel flavors that have defined the snack for much of its 62-year run. In 2022 they launched Mega Bites, and rolled out limited time flavors like Dunkin’ Pumpkin Spice Grahams and Frank’s RedHot, the latter of which was successful enough to merit a permanent launch of the varietal. It even threw out the playbook and made a potato-based Goldfish to get a potato chip-esque flavor. Perhaps owing to that versatility, Goldfish are the fastest-growing cracker brand in the country, and sales are up 33 percent over the past three years according to owner Campbell’s.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

High Tide

The number of high-tide floods in cities along the Gulf Coast has been rising, and their frequency is upending centuries of settlement and threatening billions of dollars’ worth of damage along the coast. The projections suggest that the flooding seen lately — itself incredibly destructive — is just the beginning, with high-tide floods in the Gulf region projected to be 15 times more frequent in 2050 compared to the frequency seen in 2020. Some of that is because the cities themselves are subsiding and getting lower even as the waters are rising, which has exacerbated the impacts of the rising seas. In Galveston, the sea level is 8.4 inches higher in 2023 than it was in 2010, in Wilmington, NC, it’s 7 inches higher, in Pensacola it’s 6.5 inches higher and in Naples it’s 4.9 inches higher.

Chris Mooney, Brady Dennis, Kevin Crowe and John Muyskens, The Washington Post

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Numlock News: April 29, 2024 • Manga, Challengers, Mauritius

By Walt Hickey

Three’s A Crowd

Challengers, the Zendaya-starring Luca Guadagnino movie about three people who play literal and metaphorical tennis, made $15 million this past weekend, the second-best performance for an R-rated original film since the onset of the pandemic. The movie made another $9 million overseas, with audiences coming out in force to watch the provocative music video to a tennis-themed Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor concept album.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Wine

A records request from the Financial Times to better understand the British government’s £3.66 million wine cellar operated out of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office has come up slightly short of hopes, though the government’s booze stash remains intriguing. The wine cellar is used to get foreign dignitaries drunk, and its selection is stocked by a retired diplomat as well as four Masters of Wine. The cellar is stocked with French reds, but Government Hospitality refused to offer a copy of the wine cellar stock list and furthermore ruled out identifying the Masters of Wine who serve on the committee, which sets us all up for a real inebriati situation: to steal from Mitchell and Webb.

Louis Ashworth, Financial Times

Tortured Poets

The numbers are in, and Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department was a smash hit for the current era of music distribution, pulling in 2.61 million album-equivalent units in the first week of release, the best weekly figure for any album since Adele’s 25, which moved 3.482 million units in 2015. That number is generally considered to be unbeatable given the changes in how bestsellers are calculated and the differences in consumption and media buying habits. The album also propelled Swift to the best-ever week in streaming for an album, with 891.37 million streams. Even setting aside streaming, the record sold 1.914 million copies, the third-biggest sales figure since Luminate’s sales data began in 1991.

Chris Willman, Variety

Connected

The islands of Mauritius and Reunion off the coast of Madagascar are connected to the rest of the internet through three cables, one of which is a 13,500-kilometer South Africa Far East submarine fiber cable belonging to Mauritius Telecom, Vodaphone Group and Orange SA. On Friday, those cables sustained a technical malfunction that knocked out a good amount of internet to the island, jeopardizing its financial and tourism industries. The effects have already been felt, with SBM Bank halting operations as of Friday due to the interruption. Mauritius Telecom has since restored connectivity, and said that the cable had not been damaged as originally feared. It’s been a rough time for subsea cables, with three cables off the coast of Yemen severed by rebels and four cables near the Ivory Coast damaged after seismic activity.

Kamlesh Bhuckory, Bloomberg

Manga

Sales of manga in the United States have quadrupled since 2020, and the format has come to dominate in just a short time. Out of the 44.7 million graphic novels sold in 2023, 21.8 million (49 percent) of them were manga, and unit sales in the first nine months of 2023 were 351 percent higher than the same period of 2019. This is motivating lots of companies, from established players in the manga space to new entrants, to dive in. Many manga series are being developed specifically with an English-speaking audience in mind, and the shift in demand has had an impact on what product gets made and what spreads.

Deb Aoki, Publishers Weekly

Grocery Runs

Grocery prices are up 21 percent in three years, and one thing that’s changed is that people make more runs than they used to, go to more stores pursuing different sales, and buy less on each given run. Overall shoppers are making 8 percent more trips than they did last year, and traditional grocers have shed a bit of market share, accounting for 66 percent of total consumer spending on food at home, down from 69 percent in 2017. Fueling that is people going to more and often specialized stores for their food: Americans bought food and beverages from an average of 20.7 retailers in 2023-24, compared to 16.8 retailers in 2019-20.

Rachel Wolfe, The Wall Street Journal

Permian

In New Mexico and Texas, the removal of vast quantities of oil from the ground as well as the disposal of vast amounts of wastewater underground have caused parts of the Permian Basin to sink while other parts are pushed upward. From 2017 to 2020, oil production in the Delaware Basin subregion of the Permian tripled, and over the period some parts of the land subsided more than 5 inches while other parts expanded more than 2 inches. Normally, the ground shifts by less than a tenth of an inch per year. When production hit a high in 2023, some parts of the basin had subsided by over 11 inches compared to 2015, while other areas saw expansion of up to 5 inches. You can even see water laws on the map: New Mexico has more restrictions on water disposal, so companies ship 2 million barrels of water across state lines and into Texas every day, with the Texas side of the border expanding while the New Mexico part has sunk.

Benoît Morenne and Andrew Mollica, The Wall Street Journal

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