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Numlock News: December 14, 2023 • Dunks, Boxed, Fantasy

Dec 14

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By Walt Hickey

Boxed

The price of cardboard is increasing, which onlookers perceive to be a positive indicator for the state of the economy as it's a sign that troublingly high levels of inventory have dropped back down toward normal. Currently, the price for the benchmark 42-pound unbleached kraft linerboard is $825 a ton. The price of linerboard, which is used for the outer edge of boxes, is increasing by $70 to $75 per ton, and the cost of the fluted medium that goes inside the flat layers of a piece of cardboard is increasing $100 to $110 per ton. The price hikes should hit after the holidays, when peak demand for boxes slips.

Ryan Dezember, The Wall Street Journal

Fantasy

A former Jacksonville Jaguars employee was accused of defrauding the football team out of $22.2 million, and since those accusations emerged the main thing we have learned is that this man was considered hilariously bad at gambling on daily fantasy sports, so much so that he has been repeatedly roasted in the press about just how abysmal his play was and how crappy he was at the game. According to a site that tracks individual daily fantasy sports performance, the linked account “ParlayPicker” put almost $500,000 into tournaments since 2017, and rival players said that the account was a regular at untracked elite three-man contests with $24,000 buy-ins. The last tournament ParlayPicker entered had a $29,000 buy-in and saw the player finish in 129th place out of 150 finalists. His attorney said 99 percent of the misappropriated funds were gambling losses.

David Purdum, ESPN

Dunked

A new study analyzed the eating behaviors of 18 Goffin's cockatoos over the course of 12 days, seeing how they consumed crackers. Overall, seven of the birds dunked their food in water at least once, and three of the birds regularly dunked the dry food into water, presumably in order to make it more palatable. The birds are already known to open puzzle boxes and make tools to reach food, but this is the first time that food dunking — which among birds had been previously documented in just grackles and crows — has been seen in parrots. This means that parrots join the list of animals known to prepare their food in some capacity. Future experiments with larger sample sizes may unearth even more extreme versions of this behavior, potentially identifying the logical endpoint of this behavior: the parrot that got really into cracker dumping and insists on using mineral water prepared in a seasoned cast-iron bowl with artisanal flourishes to produce a full-beak flavor profile that brings out both the terroir of the water and the umami of the cracker.

Emily Anthes, The New York Times

Thanks to everyone reviewing my book!

French

The percentage of people in Quebec whose main language is French has declined from 79 percent in 2016 to 77.5 percent in 2021, and for the main francophone region in Canada with a historical complexity unique to Quebec, that does constitute a provincial crisis. This has made the government even more worried about Franglais, which is the presence of English slang mixing into French, an anxiety so acute that an ad campaign has been launched to warn of its spread. It's also provoked new laws that codify French as the exclusive language of many legally binding contracts and government services.

Vipal Monga, The Wall Street Journal

Songs

A new study of zebra finches finds that, like most Disney protagonists, if these birds are prevented from singing for any significant period of time they'll suffer awful health consequences. The study found that a daily workout of the vocal muscles is utterly necessary lest those muscles atrophy. In finches that were surgically made unable to use their vocal muscles, they were five times as weak as the control group within two days. When birds were just kept in the dark, where they are not motivated to sing, the muscles lose 50 percent of their strength within a week. When returned to the light, the finches resumed singing, but they emerged from the darkness with a significantly more limited vocal range, and when their songs before and after their dark times were played for a female, the birds preferred the "before" 75 percent of the time. While most of the conclusions from this are about the importance of practice, I contend it also incidentally proves that 25 percent of birds dig a darker, more contemplative and rougher sound, essentially emo music.

Olivia Ferrari, Scientific American

Hypochondria

A new study found that hypochondriacs might actually have a point, as a review of 4,100 Swedish patients coded with hypochondriasis over the course of 24 years found that indeed the overall death rate was a bit higher among the hypochondriacs than among the control group. Overall, the death rate was 8.5 per 1,000 person years among hypochondriacs compared to 5.5 per 1,000 person years among those in the control. If anything, it argues that the perpetual state of medical worry among those with illness anxiety is worth treatment in and of itself.

Carla K. Johnson, The Associated Press

MDMA

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies has filed a new drug submission application to the FDA for the drug MDMA, which is currently listed as a schedule 1 drug and is illegal, but which some hold has strong potential as a treatment for PTSD. The application is backed by two phase 3 studies that bear out that promise. One of them found that patients treated with doses of MDMA averaged a 23.7 point drop in their CAPS-5 score, which measures symptoms of PTSD, a significant improvement over the 14.8 point drop in those who were treated with a placebo. The study is poised to be published in a medical journal early next year, but the results were evidently encouraging enough that MAPS was emboldened to apply for the drug, which if all goes well could see an FDA decision as early as August.

Max Bayer, Fierce Biotech

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