Numlock News: February 2, 2023 • Caesium, Icebreaker, Forks
By Walt HickeyMan It’s A Hot ZoneThe mining company that dropped a 6-by-8-millimeter chunk of extremely radioactive caesium-137 somewhere along an 870-mile road in Australia announced that state emergency services had successfully found the nodule. A vehicle driving 70 kilometers per hour (43 miles per hour) loaded with radiation-detecting equipment found the item, which was roughly 2 meters off the side of the road in a pile of pebbles. The item could cause skin burns and radiation sickness if improperly handled, and was being sent to the Gudai-Darri mine as part of a density gauge. The current fine for failing to handle a radioactive substance in Australia is set at an extremely funny level of merely A$1,000 ($700) for the initial offense and another A$50 ($35) for each additional day. The mine has offered to reimburse the government for the cost of the search for the needle in the haystack. Peter Hoskins and James FitzGerald, BBC VesselsAn Italian research mission has sailed further south than any ship has ever done before, continuing in a grand tradition of Italian exploration where an initial achievement ends up being a gigantic bummer once you contemplate the consequences. The icebreaker Laura Bassi reached a point in the Bay of Whales with the coordinates 78° 44.280 S, the furthest south a ship has ever gone, according to the Italian National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics. An attempt to reach the same area in 2017 failed due to too much impenetrable ice. Idle DescentsAn additional 11 U.S. airports will adopt the idle descent method of landing planes, where incoming planes cut the engines and glide down onto the tarmac. Right now 64 airports in the U.S. — including in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Denver, Houston, Miami, Seattle and D.C. — currently use it rather than “staircase descents,” where air traffic control tells pilots to lower altitudes in a number of steps before landing. Idle descent has a number of significant advantages, namely that it significantly cuts down on noise during landing and saves a considerable amount of fuel, with airlines saving 90,000 gallons of fuel on average. The rollout is possible thanks to updating models that allow for the adjustments of dozens of flight routes. JapanLast year Hollywood movies won 31.2 percent of the box office in Japan, up significantly from 2021 but still down from the 45.6 percent in 2019. The biggest movie in Japan last year was One Piece Film: Red which hauled in ¥19.7 billion ($151 million) with the only U.S. film in the top five being Top Gun: Maverick and the rest of the top five rounded out by other local animated films. All told there were 1,402 films released in Japan last year, up from 1,143 in 2021, 893 of which were Japanese and 509 international. This year expectations are high for How Do You Live?, the new Miyazaki film, as well as several films in the Godzilla franchise. Gavin J. Blair, The Hollywood Reporter Fork OffThe New York City Council passed a law 43-7 that would eliminate the use of single-use plastic foodware throughout the city, forcing residents to use non-plastic silverware to eat food on the go and requiring our local idiot politicians to use a real fork and knife when they cut their pizza like knuckle-dragging tourists. New York City discards 20,000 tons of unused plastic foodware every year, according to the National Resources Defense Council. The move follows a ban on single-use plastic bags and non-compostable straws and coffee stirrers. MeetingsSeveral companies are taking deliberate steps to slash the number of meetings they force their employees to participate in. Shopify made superfluous meetings enemy number one, and the purge worked. Since cancelling recurring group meetings, banning most meetings on Wednesdays and requiring all meetings with 50 or more people to happen in a six-hour window on Thursday, Shopify in the aggregate deleted 12,000 events from calendars and freed up 95,000 hours for their workers. Meeting bloat has gotten bad: According to Microsoft’s data on usage of their business product Teams, the number of meetings attended by the average user more than doubled from February 2020 to February 2022, and the time spent in those meetings tripled. Lauren Weber, The Wall Street Journal BadRxThe Federal Trade Commission announced that GoodRx will pay $1.5 million and overhaul its business to ensure that it stops sharing patient health information and data to advertisers, and work to get the third parties it hawked patient data to for money to delete that data. The FTC alleged that GoodRx shared what medications that users looked for on their app, what medications they spent GoodRx coupons on, and what conditions they were getting treated for with advertisers. HIPAA doesn’t apply to companies like GoodRx, but the FTC said that GoodRx certainly seemed to make it seem like it did by putting a cosmetic HIPAA icon on their website. 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. 2022 Sunday subscriber editions: 2022 · NIMBY · Undersea Life · Bob vs Bob · Instant Delivery Curse · Monopoly · Twitter · Crypto · Rotoscope · Heat Pumps · The Ruck · Tabletop · Mexican Beer · The Chaos Machine · [CENSORED] · Podcast Industrialization · Fantasy Shows · Law Dork · Chinese Box Office · Box Office Recovery ·Giant Hornets · Graphic Novels · Infotainment · Nuclear Energy · Fast Fashion · Salty · Twitter Friction · Fangirls · Air Quality · Non-Colonial AI · The Reckoning · Hippos · Fixing Baseball · Booze TrialsSunday Edition Archives: 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018You're currently a free subscriber to Numlock News. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
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Numlock News: February 1, 2023 • Owls, Kias, Omegas
Wednesday, February 1, 2023
By Walt Hickey To The Moon Swiss watch exports hit 23.7 billion Swiss francs in 2022, up 11.6 percent year over year and at an all-time high. Overall 15.8 million watches were exported in 2022, which
Numlock News: January 31, 2023 • Salamanders, Robot Music, Mayans
Tuesday, January 31, 2023
By Walt Hickey Audits An analysis of 90 government audits into overpayments made to Medicare Advantage health plans covering billings from 2011 to 2013 revealed a combined $12 million in overpayments
Numlock News: January 30, 2023 • Fish, Whopper, Caesium
Monday, January 30, 2023
By Walt Hickey Fish Plays In the great spirit of Twitch Plays Pokémon, several channels that involve pseudorandom attempts to play video games have sprung up and thrived, one of which was operated by a
Numlock News: January 27, 2023 • Universal, Big Box, Garbage Fire
Friday, January 27, 2023
By Walt Hickey Have a great weekend! Universal Universal's theme parks have been a major bright spot on the earnings of Comcast, the cable company, responsible for $2.11 billion in revenue in the
Numlock News: January 26, 2023 • Yerba Mate, Belgium, Metrocard
Thursday, January 26, 2023
By Walt Hickey Blockbusted Between Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water and Elvis, this year's crop of Best Picture nominees is the highest-ever grossing class of films, with all 10 nominees
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