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Numlock News: December 11, 2023 • Crusty, Ghibli, Gyro

Dec 11

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By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Ghibli

Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron won the American box office for the first weekend in the auteur’s long career, with its $12.8 million opening bringing it to the first original anime title to top the North American domestic box office chart. For perspective, the most recent Miyazaki movie to get released in the U.S., The Wind Rises, earned $5.2 million over the course of its entire U.S. run. The new movie, an adventure story set in the Japanese countryside during the Second World War, made $85 million in Japan and has been generating awards buzz. The movie’s audience skewed very young: 80 percent of ticket buyers were between the ages of 18 and 34, a testament to the success that Japanese animation and distributors like GKIDS have had in developing these movies into events, and also how much the kids are just crying out for more movies about weird freaky birds, just all kind of ‘em, most of which are metaphors, kids love that stuff.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

SmileDirectClub

The telehealth orthodontics company SmileDirectClub has shut down, which I’m sure is fascinating information for anyone wearing one of their aligners. The company hawked their $1,850 aligners as an alternative to braces and IPOed in 2019 at a valuation of $8.9 billion, though the company struggled to turn a profit and shut down its global operations effective immediately on Friday, cancelling all outstanding orders and encouraging customers to see a dentist for further treatment. Throughout its existence, the company was plagued by customers who accused it of false advertising and violating FDA regulations, particularly with a controversial policy where in order to get a refund thousands of customers had to ink a nondisclosure and delete negative social media posts.

John Yoon, The New York Times

Gyro Special Deluxe

In 2009, six gyroscopes were installed on the Hubble Space Telescope to ensure that the telescope can continue to function normally for some time to come. These are instruments where a wheel spins at a rate of 19,200 revolutions per minute within a sealed cylinder, and small movements of that spinning wheel allow the Hubble’s computer to figure out things about the telescope’s turn rate. Wires connecting those instruments can degrade, so there’s some redundancy built in — Hubble needs three to operate normally — but in the long run things are not looking great. As it stands, three of the six new gyros installed in 2009 have since failed, and of the remaining three, one of them is noisy and shows signs of wear. To plan ahead, engineers designed a new way for the telescope to operate even with one gyroscope, but it’d limit its ability to follow faster-moving targets.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

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Turbine Techs

The job that’s expected to experience the most growth from 2022 to 2032 is the occupation of wind turbine service tech, which is projected to grow 44.9 percent by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, narrowly edging out nurse practitioners (44.5 percent growth). Behind those two are data scientists (35.2 percent growth) and statisticians (31.6 percent growth), which sounds like good news for Numlock if I’ve ever heard it. That wind turbine tech growth will be driven by a massive scale-up in onshore wind on top of the existing 73,000 turbines across 44 states, and those new turbines all need a twice-yearly check up in addition to repairs, which will provide enough long-term maintenance work for a generation of turbine techs.

Matthew Boyle, Bloomberg

Clear Wood

Researchers are keen to develop transparent wood, advancing a process first described in 1992 to bleach pigments away in plant cells in order to make translucent, if not transparent, wood. The material was relegated to niche journals for a while but has lately provoked research interest given a number of positive properties that a transparent wood could lend to building. A millimeter-thin sheet of resin-filled wood skeleton can let 80 percent to 90 percent of light through, though a 3.7-millimeter-thick piece of translucent wood is only going to let 40 percent through. However, that means that it could be appealing as an architectural feature, given the strength and durability of wood and the excellent insulation that wood provides over other materials like glass. Transparent wood, in experiments, conducts heat at a rate five times lower than glass.

Jude Coleman, Knowable Magazine

Crusty

Lots of the Great Wall of China has eroded and degraded over the years, but lots of the best-preserved sections have been preserved in no small part thanks to a thick “biocrust” of moss, lichen, bacteria and other microscopic organisms that a new paper in Science Advances describes as a living skin. Those living things have helped repel corrosion that could come from rain or wind over time, and they’re promising enough that they may be considered valuable to cultivate and spread to other parts of the wall to shore up long-term protection. Biocrusts currently cover 12 percent of Earth’s land surface, predominantly in drier climates.

Ethan Freedman, Science

China

China is slowly emerging as a major export market for American craft breweries, and as the high-end beer market in China rebounds from the pandemic, many U.S. breweries are poised to pounce. In 2022, U.S. craft brewers exported 12,000 barrels of beer to China, $71.1 million worth of beer, good enough for the country to make up 6 percent of U.S. craft beer exports overall, trailing only Canada (25.2 percent of U.S. exports), the U.K. (7.3 percent) and Sweden (7.1 percent). The pandemic really was a setback for American craft beer in China, as volumes exported declined 27 percent from 2019 to 2022, but recent results are encouraging.

Dave Infante, VinePair

Dave Infante was incidentally the guest on this week’s Sunday special edition, talking about a story about state money going to controversial brewing companies that he’s been chasing down all year. I love his newsletter Fingers, the alcohol business lies at this intersection of government regulation, massive industry, relentless branding, plucky startups and entrenched capital, and that makes it just captivating reading time after time. We taked the secrets of contract brewing to the perils of mail-order alcohol, I dropped the paywall, check it out. Do subscribe to Fingers if it sounds fun.

Fingers

A newsletter about the business, culture, and chaos of drinking in America.

By Dave Infante

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