Numlock News: March 3, 2025 • Anora, Mixue, Stars

Mar 03, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Anora

Independent movie Anora won 5 Oscars last night including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Actress for Mikey Madison and Best Original Screenplay for Sean Baker. With four competitive Oscar wins, Sean Baker tied Walt Disney for the most Oscars in a single night. Walt set the record in 1953, winning Best Documentary (Feature), Best Documentary (Short Subject), Best Short Subject (Cartoon) and Best Short Subject (Two-Reel). I’m there was ruthlessly competitive back in the day. That winning documentary short, The Alaskan Eskimo, was such a triumphant success for the medium and a point of pride for Walt and the whole company that Disney+ describes it as, “No results found for ‘The Alaskan Eskimo.’”

Jordan Moreau, Variety

Mount Vesuvius

As archaeology and scientific discovery around the 79AD destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii by Mount Vesuvius continue, there’s one nagging question about the eruption that has not actually gone away: when it happened. There are historically 2 dueling dates for V-Day. The widely accepted date was August 24, the date that 17-year-old Pliny the Younger reported he witnessed the event in letters to the historian Tacitus about 25 years after the fact. The other date is October 24, which was fueled by the discovery of graffiti that indicated “October 17” on the modern calendar. This would have been pretty hard to write if the graffiti artist had been evaporated by a volcano two months prior. There’s also evidence of wine in jars (indicating the grape harvest was over) and unripe autumnal fruits like pomegranates and chestnuts.

Franz Lidz, The New York Times

Wagers

In 1591, Pope Gregory XIV formally banned Catholics from betting on the tenure or elections of popes. While the edict was abrogated in 1918, the rich history of controversially gambling on the papacy is alive and well. You too can head over to betting markets to place money on the health of the pontiff, like some mid-market modern Medici, if you so choose. According to Polymarket, their market for “New Pope in 2025?” has generated $420,000 in wagers as of Friday. This has presented one of several moral questions about gambling as it becomes increasingly legal, common and accessible, with morbid bets making their way to all sorts of markets. My view is that it’s probably a bad idea to place available winnings on the event of an individual’s demise. It essentially creates a crowdsourced marketplace for making someone worth more dead than alive, which is never a great thought to put out into the world.

Scott Nover, Bloomberg

Ancient Stars

The James Webb Space Telescope is eagerly hunting for “population III stars,” which are stars only made from the primordial gasses resulting from the Big Bang. All the stars we know and love are the product of stellar recycling, incorporating elements beyond the hydrogen and helium produced from earlier stars. Essentially, population III stars are made from hydrogen and helium alone. While they must have theoretically existed — masses 1000 times that of the sun, 10 times larger than any existing star, burning hot and fast and going supernova in just a few million years — we’ve yet to spot one given their brief and early lives. That said, the Jaes Webb Space Telescope has spotted a great contender: a dwarf galaxy potentially full of ’em, called GLIMPSE-16043. The telescope observed as it used to be when the universe was 850 million years old: a mass of 100,000 solar masses, burning very faintly for only 5 million years with very hot stars and pretty much no oxygen. It’s just a candidate — it could also just be a cloud of lingering gas energized by a nearby black hole.

Daniel Clery, Science

Mixue

Mixue Ice Cream and Tea has eclipsed McDonald’s, Starbucks and Subway to become the largest food and beverage chain in the world, finishing the year with 45,282 locations, an increase from 7,100 in 2019 and double the level of three years ago. It’s looking to IPO and raise $510 million in the process and debuted in Hong Kong today. It’s selling ice cream and drinks at the price of 6 yuan, or about 83 cents, which has made for explosive growth in China where the economy has many hunting down inexpensive treats.

Stu Woo, The Wall Street Journal

Oscars

Disney managed to sell out all of its ad inventory for the Oscars, including not just ad spots during the award show (which the Mouse was selling for $1.7 million to $2.3 million per 30 seconds) but also the accompanying sponsorships of GMA and Live with Kelly and Mark. These are the feats of synergy that make the whole shebang possible. This comes as Disney hits a bit of an inflection point with the Oscars: the award show is reportedly kicking the tires on other potential distributors to secure the Academy’s desired deal increase.

Brian Steinberg, Variety and Lucas Shaw, Bloomberg

Industry

In many parts of the American West, extractive industries like mining or oil production and landscape-altering industries such as power generation or damming have given way to promising tourism businesses. Participation in road, mountain and BMX biking increased by 22.9 percent in 2022, camping by 12 percent and winter sports like snowshoeing and cross-country skiing by double digits. In many Western states — especially ones with national parks or other preserved land — recreation is a solid and rising percentage of the economy.

Jonathan Thompson, High Country News

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Numlock Sunday: Neil Paine on the best return on your time in sports

Mar 02, 2025

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Neil Paine, my former colleague from FiveThirtyEight who writes the great

Neil’s Substack

diving into sports and sports analytics.

I wanted to talk to Neil for a couple reasons, one being that the Four Nations just pushed hockey to the forefront of the national attention in ways that would have been completely unexpected, and another being that I’m a huge fan of his writing and his newsletter and he’s been on a real tear lately.

Neil can be found at Neil’s Substack, and at his podcast Podracing.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Neil, how's it going dude?

It's going great, Walt. Thanks for having me on. It is always a pleasure, man.

Again, I am just such a fan of your work from FiveThirtyEight days all through the Neil’s Substack era. So it is good to have you on.

You gotta have the eponymous Substack. That's what I always say.

I think that you've pulled it off. It was an audacious thing to try to supplant all other Neils in terms of Substack branding. But nevertheless, I really do think you have pulled it off.

Well, I was a little worried about Neil Armstrong. Did he pass away, I can't actually remember.

I don't think he's with us anymore. And realistically, knowing the Substack crowd, I think that Buzz Aldrin's a little bit of a better fit.

Oh, yeah. Where's Buzz's Substack? You gotta find that.

I just wanted to have you on because you cover the sports world, but you also really cover a level of depth throughout the sports world that is very fun, which means that I think you cover things that other folks don't always cover. I think that a lot of people can get very distracted by the big, big stories of NFL and NBA, you have some extremely good hockey stuff. We should talk about Four Nations and the current situation in the NHL right now. But also, I definitely want to talk a little bit more about some fun stuff that you had lately, whether it was sports ROI or your NASCAR stuff.

I guess we'll start off at the beginning. Do you want to talk a little bit about this extremely riveting moment in hockey that got this sport on the map of a lot of people who hadn't really been following it?

Yeah, I gotta admit, I was a little surprised. So for the listeners that maybe don't know, instead of the All-Star Game for the NHL, this year they decided to do a four-country international tournament that was called the Four Nations Faceoff. It's weird because it's not sanctioned in the same way that the Olympics are or like you see in other sports, the World Cup, that type of thing. It was like there's been a World Cup of hockey, but it's not regarded the same way that the World Cup in soccer is. This was organized by the NHL. It was specifically done to happen during this period of time in which the league was off for what would have been the All-Star Game.

There were even questions about which teams were the Four Nations in the Four Nations tournament. It ended up being Canada and the U.S. and Sweden and Finland. So no Russia. They're banned from international hockey tournaments because of the whole Ukraine situation. The Czech Republic, or I guess Czechia if you want to call it that now, was also excluded. That one was the controversial one, but they didn't have as many NHL players as Finland. There was talk that, “Hey, what if we did a combined Czechia and Slovakian team like the old Czechoslovakia?”

No!

That was actually a thing.

Really?

Yeah, David Pasternak of the Bruins, who is from Czechia, suggested that. It was like, We love the Slovaks. Let's get together and do it again. But that didn't end up happening. So it was those Four Nations.Predictably, the cream that rose to the top were Canada and the U.S., and they played a game in the round robin, or the earlier stages of the tournament, the U.S. won. It was most notable because there were three fights in the first nine seconds of this game. It was just an encapsulation of this rivalry between the U.S. and Canada that, of course, has been magnified by geopolitics and various other factors coming in. It sort of hit at the right time.

Neil’s Substack

Once a Mismatch, the U.S. and Canada Finally Meet as Hockey Equals

If Thursday’s championship game of the 4 Nations Face-Off isn’t the biggest game in the history of the Unite…

11 days ago · 15 likes · 2 comments · Neil Paine

The championship game has those same teams waiting for each other. It's a close game throughout: goes into overtime. The Canadians get their revenge on the U.S. when Conor McDavid, who's like the best player in the world, scores the game-winning goal.

It wasn't surprising that the U.S. and Canada made it to the final. They're kind of the two best countries in hockey. That itself is kind of a story where the U.S., for pretty much all of history up until recently, has lagged way behind Canada. Canada, of course, invented hockey, or at least is the home of hockey, and the U.S. was not good at it. When the miracle on ice happened, the reason it was a miracle was because no one thought that they could win, especially that group of players against the Soviets. But the U.S. has improved a lot, and it was this collision course. But Canada was like, “We're still the king. We're still the best country at hockey.”

The most surprising thing was the ratings for this tournament, which yielded the best-watched NHL game in decades. I guess you could debate whether it is actually an official NHL game or not, but more people watched this than watched Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final and various other official NHL games. And it really spoke to the way that a bunch of circumstances came together to capture people's attention. It's great for hockey because it had so many eyes on the game, and you get to know these stars that maybe us hockey fans know, but the wider sports world didn't know.

I've had people come up and talk to me just randomly, like, “Hey, did you watch that game, what did you think of the Four Nations” in a way that has never happened before with hockey. People don't come up and talk about that typically. It was a little bit like “Hey, what did you think of the Super Bowl” type of thing. It wasn't anywhere near as many eyeballs, but it was that type of cultural event.

The downside for the NHL is it's not really something that you can plan or predict. Going into this, people weren't necessarily sold on whether it would be a huge success or whether people would be interested in it. I don't know how replicable it is, but it did stand in really stark contrast against the NBA All-Star Game, which was a couple weekends ago, as well. It had its lowest rating in a long time and was a disaster for the league.

That's not to say that hockey is more popular than basketball. The NBA is more popular than the NHL overall. But something about this format, the conditions that the championship game was played under and the drama both on and off the ice captured people in a way that a lot of All-Star Games in every sport have failed to do for a long time. There's a big debate over whether All-Star Games have outlived their usefulness, and whether we should just get rid of them. Some leagues are getting rid of them, like the NFL.

It's interesting to see that they really bottled lightning on this one, and it would be fun to kind of see how you would apply that even to other sports. I just kind of want to talk a little bit about this: the U.S. versus Canada showdown is not necessarily over in hockey. You obviously have a really, really good forecasting system and ELO system for the NHL, and the Winnipeg Jets are (somewhat inexplicably, given where they were at the beginning of the season) at the very tippy-top of it, no?

Numlock News: February 28, 2025 • Ants, Monolith, Herculaneum

Feb 28, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Cigars

Habanos S.A. has a global monopoly on Cuban cigar sales, and business is booming. The joint venture of Cubatabaco and Altadis had sales up to $827 million, an increase of 16 percent year over year. Key markets include Spain, Switzerland, Great Britain and China. The cigar boom is leading to an overall increase in demand for the various accouterments of the hobby, such as sophisticated humidors designed to maximize the longevity of the cigars by regulating temperature and humidity; these price up to thousands of dollars.

Andrea Rodríguez, The Associated Press

MH370

Malaysia’s government agreed to resume and expand the search for MH370, the Boeing 777 that disappeared after taking off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing in 2014 with 227 passengers and 12 crew onboard. A U.S. exploration firm, Ocean Infinity, has been enlisted to continue the search. The company was involved in the first canvas of the ocean — which ended in 2018 — and covered an area of 120,000 square kilometers in the southern Indian Ocean. The new search will expand the search area by 15,000 square kilometers and will run for 18 months.

Reuters

Herculaneum

A man who died in bed in the city of Herculaneum in the year 79 CE when the volcano Vesuvius erupted was found to have black, glass-like shards inside his skull. This, according to a new study published in Scientific Reports, is the poor man’s brain. It had turned into black glass shards as a cloud of scorching ash passed through the city, hastily heating the urban area and then quickly dissipating, facilitating the formation of glass. What a way to go.

Collin Blinder, Science

Monolith

The game studio Monolith was shut down by Warner Bros. Games earlier this week. An interesting reverberation of shutdown relates to U.S. patent 2016279522A1, which protects the “Nemesis System” that the studio was known for. Video game patents are rare — in general about 50 percent of patents get granted, but only 6 percent of video game patent filings actually get approved — and this one relates to a unique system designed and used in games like Shadow of Mordor. It allowed encountered adversaries to gain motivation, strengths and weaknesses alongside the player’s character throughout the gaming adventure. It is a neat twist on the endless encounters one might have in these games. It’s a clever idea that can increase the verisimilitude of a game, but unfortunately, it will be one locked away in Warner Bros. I.P. vault until August 2036.

Kevin Purdy, Ars Technica

Netflix

Netflix released its six-month data dump, illustrating just how hit-driven and top-heavy the streaming business is. According to Netflix, 15,663 titles got at least 100,000 views in the back half of the year, only 29 percent of which hit 1 million views or more. The top 1 percent of titles accounted for 22.32 billion hours of viewing (which was 24 percent of the total viewing minutes) from just 156 titles alone. All told: the top 10 percent of titles were responsible for 68 percent of all viewing, good for 64.16 billion hours.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Chains

The NFL will adopt automated measurements of first downs in 2025, setting aside the age-old ten-yard chain measurement system with a sophisticated Sony ball monitoring system. That being said, game officials will continue to spot the ball between plays, and the physical chains will stay on the sidelines during the year as a backup and a visual aid for the players and coaches. The NFL says that the automated process takes 30 seconds to check if the first down has been made, while the existing manual process comes in at 75 seconds give or take. On average, 12 measurements were made during each week of the regular season.

Jacob Feldman, Sportico

Ants

The effectiveness of ants at cleaning detritus off a rainforest floor at their scale can be hard to fully understand. Thanks to their biomechanics and the physiology of their mandibles and necks, ants can lift stuff more than 5,000 times their body weight, which again should probably make Ant-Man more interesting than he actually is but, like, here we are. Ants are responsible for 25 percent of the terrestrial biomass in tropical forests, again provoking the question of why Ant-Man lives in Manhattan. Their ability to move lots and lots of material is impressive: one nest can harvest two metric tons of leaves annually, which again, I guess would be a lot more impressive if Ant-Man specifically fought flora-based adversaries with leaf-based offensive equipment, instead of Thanos.

Krista Langlois, bioGraphic

It’s Oscar weekend! Don’t forget that there’s a whole spinoff newsletter of Numlock about award season, if you want to check it out.

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.

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.

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Numlock News: February 27, 2025 • Survivor, Peregrine Falcon, Godzilla

Feb 27, 2025

Outlast

The scourge of inflation is striking at the heart of the very firmament of American society, the bedrock upon which our social contracts are based, the foundation of our values: reality television. For what are we without the American dream, specifically the one where you win a fortune on a game or reality show? With institutions such as Survivor — the top non-sports program in the adult demo — about to enter its 50th season, it’s worth observing that the prize for winning remains firmly at $1 million after 25 years. In context, the buying power of this $1 million would have amounted to $534,850 in the 2000s when the show originally aired. Naturally, people don’t play Survivor for the money, they play it for the love of the game and the thrill of victory, nevertheless, it’s hard to look at the state of reality television and see a prize pool keeping up with the times. American Idol cut its cash prize down from $1 million in its early seasons to just $250,000 now. Top Chef is an exception, increasing its purse from $100,000 in 2006 to $250,000 today. This stagnation has made things ripe for disruption and is one reason impresarios like Mr. Beast can buy appeal by offering an impressive $10 million prize pool for Beast Games.

James Hibberd, The Hollywood Reporter

Roboumps

Major League Baseball is experimenting with an Automated Ball-Strike system, specifically one at Salt River Fields, where the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies meet for spring training. The system under testing works like so: teams get two challenges per game where they can question the call of the ump, they then throw the question to the Hawk-Eye tracking system and if the challenging team is right, they don’t even have to give up the challenge. So far 13 of the ABS systems have been installed in ballparks — five in Arizona and eight in Florida — in what’s hoped to be a rehearsal for a league-wide implementation across all 30 MLB ballparks as early as the 2026 season.

Barry M. Bloom, Sportico

Peregrine Falcons

The nests of Peregrine Falcons are distressingly empty in North America, with scientists and habitat preservation officials raising the alarm about the fastest bird in the air. A Peregrine expert who monitors their nesting sites along the Yukon River in Alaska reported that 20 of 60 nesting sites were empty, and a dozen more were missing a parent in 2023. This prompted more monitoring, with similar findings across the continent: 22 of the 44 nesting peregrines in New Jersey went missing last season, a dozen out of the 70 in Virginia were missing and Quebec’s Peregrine population saw reproductive success fall from 50 percent to 30 percent in 2022. The fear — for which there is evidence, but insufficiently conclusive evidence at this time — is that this trend is related to the avian influenza going around. Given that the falcons will hunt other birds, they may be more vulnerable than other species to the virus.

Evert Lindquist, bioGraphic

Black Plastic

An eventually retracted study suggesting kitchenware made out of black plastic might have elevated levels of dangerous chemicals sent waves through the kitchenware market, even as a denominator error in the study pulled it from credibility. If there’s a brand synonymous with black plastic kitchenware, it’s probably Oxo, which sells 1 in 12 kitchen utensils in the United States. The company maintains that its wares are safe, but they see the winds shifting. For the four weeks ending January 2025, stainless steel kitchen utensils were up 13 percent year over year, silicone was up 70 percent, and plastic nylon cookware was indeed down 23 percent.

Leslie Patton, Bloomberg

Toho

Iconic Japanese studio Toho, which has been the steward of the Godzilla franchise for decades, is seeing fast growth in its cinema and anime business. Box office receipts last year hit 91.3 billion yen (US$610 million), which was not only a record but even beat out banner years for the company like 2016 when it released Your Name and Shin Godzilla. Last year, 7 out of the top 10 movies in Japan came from Toho, with its new Detective Conan movie and the Haikyu!! movie leading the pack. The studio is currently generating 15 twelve-episode seasons of anime in-house and wants to get that number up to 30 seasons by 2032. The studio is riding a big wave for anime, and not just inside Japan as it projects that the global anime market will hit $600 billion in 2030.

Takuro Suzuki, Nikkei Asia

Phosphorus

New research suggests that “soda lakes” may have been instrumental in life’s emergence on Earth. The thinking goes that a key bottleneck for getting the chemicals needed for life is phosphorous. This bottleneck has been long described as the “phosphorus problem,” as the origin of life would have needed a lot of phosphate, and bodies of water typically have a phosphate concentration that is 10,000 times too low to brew up an ideal primordial soup. Soda lakes are one location where this could work, though, according to a study in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta,

Robert F. Service, Science

The Kingdom and the Power

The age-old crosstown rivalry between Universal and Disney in Orlando will enter a new phase this year when Universal opens up its new Epic Universe park featuring Nintendo, Harry Potter and more. It advances its long quest to compete with Disney and become a god in central Florida. In 2023 — the most recent year for which there is data — Universal’s parks attracted 61 million visitors worldwide, an increase of 70 percent from a decade ago. This is a far faster growth than the Disney parks which only saw a 7 percent increase over the same period to 142 million visitors. The current estimate from MoffettNathanson is that the new Epic Universe park would poach a million visitors from Disney World from mid-2025 to 2026.

Brooks Barnes, The New York Times

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.

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.

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Numlock News: February 26, 2025 • Diamonds, Huckleberries, Tequila

Feb 26, 2025

Huckleberries

Huckleberries in the Mountain West have resisted cultivation and can’t be grown commercially on farms. As a result, they are gathered commercially every summer, with Gifford Pinchot National Forest in southern Washington the only such forest with a large-scale commercial huckleberry program. Some want that to end, as the huckleberries had been protected by treaties with tribes but are now valuable commercial products. Good secluded berry patches are getting harder and harder to find as commercial pickers sweep through areas that locals once harvested from. The buyers pay $27.50 per gallon, and Gifford Pinchot sells seasonal permits to commercial pickers for $105 with a 70-gallon limit. Another permit costs $60 for a two-week limit. Last year Gifford Pinchot sold 928 permits for $83,445.

Josephine Woolington, High Country News

Ne Zha 2

Ne Zha 2 has become the highest-grossing animated film of all time, making $1.9 billion from a breathtaking 80,000 screens in just four weeks. Most movies with that success can only do so by succeeding everywhere, going worldwide and earning fortunes in territory after territory. In contrast, Ne Zha 2 has essentially made all its money in China alone — it made just $15 million in the largest market in the world, North America — and, it turns out that’s more than enough. Domestically, the movie’s got some patriotic momentum behind it since it was bound to be in record books. If the movie ends up at the $2.09 billion that it is currently projected at, it would be the fifth-biggest box office of all time.

Rebecca Rubin and Naman Ramachandran, Variety

Critics

The New York Drama Critics Circle is a local theater critics group that has been giving out awards since 1935, ever since the founders got mad at the Pulitzer snubs. The prize in the early years was a nickel-bronze plaque, a relief of a 1790 performance of the first American comedy performed by professionals, which took place at the John Street Theater. The practice changed in the 1940s when they switched to plaster. At some point, they lost the matrix for the plaster and the NYDCC has given out certificates ever since. Still, they’ve been on the hunt for a lead that could help them recreate their once iconic prize. Good news came in 2023, when an auction at Bonhams from the John Steinbeck escape included, in a stroke of luck, the 1938 plaque he won for Of Mice and Men, which the group’s president obtained for $3,000. Ten molds were made of the plaque at a foundry in Greenpoint, and this spring, a playwright will win a metal plaque for the first time in 80 years.

Michael Schulman, The New Yorker

Tequila

The Mexican state that produces most tequila, Jalisco, has been enjoying a tourism bump as the spirit rises in popularity. From 2019 to 2023, tourism grew 19 percent, reaching 1.2 million visitors, despite the pandemic emerging smack in the middle of that period. Tourism to the region is rising in general, and the tequila distillers are stepping up, with Jose Cuervo expanding its tourism offerings to visiting Americans. Most foreign tourism to the town of Tequila came by way of Guadalajara, often aboard the Tequila Express train, which was relaunched in 2024 after six years of sitting idle.

Zach Geballe, Vine Pair

WNBA

Diana Taurasi has announced her retirement, capping off the current greatest-of-all-time career in the WNBA. Taurasi is the leading scorer in WNBA history and has won six Olympic gold medals, playing every one of her 20 seasons for the Phoenix Mercury. Her 10,646 points in the regular season is almost 3,000 higher than the second-highest scorer, she’s the all-time leader in three-pointers, she has three WNBA championships, was the 2009 MVP and a two-time WNBA Finals MVP.

Sean Gregory, Time

Huns

A new DNA analysis published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looked at the graves of hundreds of Huns buried from 400 to 500 CE in Hungary, in an attempt to discern where precisely the nomadic warriors under Attila were from. Historians believe “Hun” comes from “Xiongnu,” who were steppe nomads recorded as threatening China from 200 BC to 100 CE. The DNA analysis showed that, yep, some of the Huns were descendants of Xiongnu elites. But also, this was an army that was keen on recruiting a multi-ethnic tour de force that racked up recruits en route to Rome. The larger coalition also included lots of people from tribes closer to Rome and their diverse burial rites back up that idea. Rather than a mass migration of a steppe society into Europe, the DNA analysis suggests the Xiongnu elite scattered. Some moved west, adapting to local cultures and marrying into other tribes, and eventually, Attila brought their descendants together to plunder Italy.

Andrew Curry, Science

Diamonds

The government of Botswana has inked a major deal with De Beers — the largest producer of diamonds in the world — that will define the next several decades of their dealings. Botswana’s share of the diamonds produced by joint venture Debswana will rise from 25 percent to 50 percent, and Botswana will get 10 billion pula (US$712 million) in development funding. The mining licenses for Debswana, which were set to expire in 2029, have been extended through 2054. The fates of Botswana and De Beers are heavily intertwined: Debswana diamond production accounts for 80 percent of the Botswana economy, and Botswana supplies 70 percent of De Beer’s rough diamonds.

Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.com

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.

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.

Posting Nexus · Memorabilia · Drainage Tile · Desert Surfing · Music · Congestion Pricing · Underwater Sound · Hunts Point · Queer Olympics · Energy Drinks · Baseball Movies · Trillion Trees · Risk Aversion ·

Packaging · Ice Cores · Stadium Names · Uncertain · Green Homes · Political Future · UFOs · Antarctica Comms · Rot Economy · The Internationalists · Video Game Funding · BYD · Disney Channel Original Movie · Talon Mine · Our Moon · Rock Salt · Wind Techs

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

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