Numlock News: September 20, 2023 • Smurf Turf, Scantron, Tomatoes
By Walt HickeySmurf TurfIn college football, one of the more iconic fields belongs to Boise State, which in 1986 decided to, rather than have fake turf that imitates the green color of grass, reject the premise that sheets of extruded polyethylene need to cosplay as something doing photosynthesis and instead chose a deep, gorgeous blue. It's weird, but pretty cool, and is called the "Smurf Turf." Since then, a couple of other schools — Coastal Carolina, Eastern Washington, Eastern Michigan and Central Arkansas — have also installed some weird-looking football fields, all getting the okay from Boise State before doing so. The reason is that the entire idea of having weird colored turf on your football field has in fact been granted a trademark to Boise State, and that trademark will be tested as SUNY Morrisville just installed a $1.28 million all-black football field, and didn't bother to get permission from Boise. Yes, any erstwhile emo will confirm it looks sick. But now Boise has a decision to make as to whether the Broncos are going to take the Mustangs to court. He Did The ThingAn artist who took 532,000 krone (£61,500) from the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg to produce a work of art about income inequality has been ordered to repay the funds after instead turning in two empty frames, a piece the artist titled Take the Money and Run. The museum wanted Jens Haaning to reproduce two earlier works, An Average Danish Annual Income (2007) which represented income using krone notes, and a 2011 work that did the same with euros. Instead he did the funniest possible thing and then the museum got mad. The court ruled that the artist ought to keep his 40,000 krone artist's fee, but would need to pay back the 532,000 krone (£61,500) that had been offered as a loan. Harriet Sherwood, The Guardian ScantronsWith the rise of digital test-taking, some in education see the sun setting on the almighty scantron, which has facilitated speedy multiple-choice testing for decades. The first automatic scoring machine was invented by IBM in 1937, but it wasn't until the 1950s when optical mark recognition scanning devices really made machine grading popular, particularly after the founding of the eponymous Scantron company in 1972. Like many successful tech enterprises, Scantron made its money by selling the grading devices for really cheap and making their actual money on the answer sheets, which go for 15 cents to 20 cents per page. In 2019, Scantron printed 800 million sheets globally per year, and the scanners can handle 15,000 per hour. HuntersBurmese pythons are not native to Florida, but like many Floridian transplants they are truly thriving there. That's an issue, as the snakes don't have any predators, and if left to their own devices would devour the vibrant wildlife of the Everglades. In an attempt to at least slow their spread, a decade ago Florida started paying people to hunt the pythons, even setting up competitions as to who could catch the most. The first hunt captured 68 pythons, and the one that just wrapped in August saw a thousand hunters capture and kill 209 pythons. That all said, the question remains if this is doing anything to actually roll back the python's expansion; 20,000 snakes have been removed since 2006, 11,000 of which from paid contractors, but they're thriving and the U.S. Geological Survey thinks that they're here to stay, and eradication is impossible. RatingsU.S. News and World Report, an institution that apparently used to be some kind of an actual magazine but which today essentially exists so a bunch of random people can arbitrarily rank colleges, is out with the newest edition of that ranking. This year, the notorious SEO play is shaking things up, namely by completely retooling their formula for evaluating higher education in America like it's a cookie recipe. The listicle company has since entirely discarded five factors in evaluating colleges — undergraduate class sizes, school class standing, alumni giving rates — that previously composed 18 percent of a school's score, and also gave less weight to how many people actually graduate from those colleges and how much the schools spend educating students. Having released their annual college rankings, presumably U.S. News and World Report went on to continue their bold tradition of filling chumboxes and not producing a single scrap of interesting writing until next year. Alan Blinder, The New York Times It's The MoneyA new survey found Americans have serious misgivings about American politics, with 65 percent saying they feel exhausted when thinking about politics and just 16 percent trusting the government some or most of the time. That said, they have the solution: 85 percent said that the cost of political campaigns make it hard for good people to run for office, 84 percent said that special interest groups and lobbyists have too much say in politics, 72 percent backed laws that would limit campaign spending and 58 percent backed laws that would reduce the role of money in politics. TomatoesResearchers have found the exact gene that makes canned Roma tomatoes hold a durable shape, and the hope is that they can breed that gene into other varieties of tomatoes so that other types of tomatoes can be harvested by machine and transported without bruising, which could cut down on costs and food weight. The study, published in Nature Plants, resulted from planting 14,000 seeds to produce the kind of ideal offspring that allowed the researchers to pinpoint the gene Solyc08g061910, which can mutate to make tomatoes more egg-shaped and thus durable. By removing Solyc08g061910 and replicating the mutation in an otherwise round tomato, they could produce elongated tomatoes. They then went on to do the science that we all want to see, which is that they used a lab press to squish 150 tomatoes to test when the tomatoes exploded, and found that even thought the gene didn't touch taste, it made much more durable tomatoes. 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. Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Audio · Garbage Intelligence · Meteorites · Overwatch League · Jam Bands · Fanatics · Eleven-ThirtyEight · Boardwalk Games · Summer Movies · Boys Weekend · Psychedelics · Country Radio · Zelda · Coyotes · Beer · Nuclear · NASCAR · Seaweed · Working · Cable · Ringmaster · Hard Seltzer · Enhanced Geothermal ·Hoop Muses · Subsea Cables · Wrestling · Tabletop Renaissance · BTSSunday Edition Archives: 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018You're currently a free subscriber to Numlock News. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
Older messages
Numlock News: September 19, 2023 • Ski Slopes, Kibbles ‘n Bits, Rhinos
Tuesday, September 19, 2023
By Walt Hickey Pet Food People are beginning to cut back on the quality of pet food for their beloved animals, with premium dry dog food shedding 2.9 percentage points marketshare year over year in the
Numlock News: September 18, 2023 • Ding Dongs, Poirot, Champagne
Monday, September 18, 2023
By Walt Hickey Welcome back! Mississippi Roughly 60 percent of the United States' exports of grain are transported to market by barge down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. It's a
Numlock News: September 13, 2023 • Acceleration, Brady Bunch, Webtoons
Sunday, September 17, 2023
By Walt Hickey This is a really important week for pre-orders, I've been told, so get your copy of my upcoming book You Are What You Watch today! Flipped, Flopped The 1959 Studio City home that
Numlock News: September 14, 2023 • Kākāpō, FaZed, Turf
Sunday, September 17, 2023
By Walt Hickey FaZed FaZe Clan is a management group for gaming-related influencers, counting 127 internet personalities and 54 esports players across 14 different teams on their client list. Some of
Numlock News: September 15, 2023 • Antarctica, Namibia, Max
Sunday, September 17, 2023
By Walt Hickey Have a great weekend! Thanks to everyone who has preordered my upcoming book. The numbers have been really encouraging and I'm so happy so many of you are excited to get your hands
You Might Also Like
Crypto Surge On Fed Cut | Trump’s DeFi Details
Saturday, September 21, 2024
Election betting could go mainstream in the US, as Kalshi triumphs over the CFTC. ADVERTISEMENT Forbes START INVESTING • Newsletters • MyForbes Nina Bambysheva Staff Writer, Forbes Money & Markets
Amazon's quest to become a startup again | 6 years of progress in driverless cars
Saturday, September 21, 2024
Can this startup improve your golf swing? | Amazon's real estate chief is retiring ADVERTISEMENT GeekWire SPONSOR MESSAGE: Get your ticket for AWS re:Invent, happening Dec. 2–6 in Las Vegas:
How climate change can get lost in translation
Saturday, September 21, 2024
+ why summer has to end
A Strategist Special Report: A Guide to GU, Uniqlo’s Sister Store
Saturday, September 21, 2024
Plus: A glittery tote that “might be the next Baggu.” The Strategist Every product is independently selected by editors. If you buy something through our links, New York may earn an affiliate
This one neat trick will make fundraising emails stop
Saturday, September 21, 2024
Fair warning — we'll be sending a LOT of fundraising emails over the next couple weeks. Every day, The Intercept produces hard-hitting investigative journalism that the corporate media never will.
Danger, Mark Robinson
Saturday, September 21, 2024
Columns and commentary on news, politics, business, and technology from the Intelligencer team. Intelligencer Weekend Reader Required Reading for Political Compulsives 1. Mark Robinson and the
The best coasters
Saturday, September 21, 2024
Like jewelry for your tables View in browser The Recommendation Our favorite coasters An assortment of coasters in various shapes and sizes with a few cups of water and tea resting on some of the
YOU LOVE TO SEE IT: A School Lending Bully Gets Expelled
Saturday, September 21, 2024
Plus, the hearing-aid cartel gets muted, the country's busiest streets are going fossil-free, and interest rates sink while spirits rise. YOU LOVE TO SEE IT: A School Lending Bully Gets Expelled By
Weekend Briefing No. 554
Saturday, September 21, 2024
Exploding Pagers and the Future of War -- Utopia On the Blockchain -- Ending Tuberculosis ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
☕ Nuclear revival
Saturday, September 21, 2024
An infamous power plant will serve Microsoft's energy needs… September 21, 2024 View Online | Sign Up | Shop Morning Brew PRESENTED BY Studio by Tishman Speyer Good morning, and happy last (