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Numlock News: February 8, 2024 • Lemon, Vegas, Arctic

Feb 8

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By Walt Hickey

When Life Gives You Lemons

A lemon that is hundreds of years old sold at auction for £1,416 at Brettell’s Auctioneers. The lemon bears an inscription that reads “Given by Mr P Lu Franchini Nov 4 1739 to Miss E Baxter” and is thought to have been a souvenir brought back from India to the United Kingdom. The desiccated fruit was found in the bottom drawer of a 19th-century Chinese collector’s chest. Given the current state of the English palate and their national tolerance for spice, I can only imagine what taste buds of the United Kingdom were accustomed to in the early 1700s, and my personal theory is that the lemon was imported as a weapon of potentially mass destruction.

Maisie Olah, BBC

Tabletop

Kickstarter has long been the primary source of funding for new and experimental tabletop games, and recently notched an annual decline in overall crowdfunding for the ascendant genre. One potential source? The Polish upstart Gamefound had a banner year in 2023, with the company’s revenues from crowdfunding rising 98 percent year over year to $56 million. As a result, even if the $226.2 million from Kickstarter was a miss for that company, in the aggregate it certainly looks like 2023 was the best year in the history of tabletop crowdfunding. Gamefound is offering serious competition, evidently: Four games that raised through the company made the top 10 most-funded projects of the year.

Charlie Hall, Polygon

Vegas

Vegas has gone from sports leagues avoiding it like the plague to a hotbed of local activity, with $7 billion being committed toward flipping Vegas from a shady sports gambling town to a bona fide sports colossus. Vegas now claims the NHL’s Golden Knights, the NFL’s Raiders, the WNBA’s Aces and soon the MLB’s A’s. That’s in part thanks to the legalization of sports gambling, which on one hand meant that Vegas lost the business to apps, but on the other hand freed up the city to pursue sports. Also fueling the ascent of Vegas as a sports town is its ascendant population: Clark County rose from 1.4 million residents in 2000 to 2.33 million in 2023.

Kim Bhasin and Randall Williams, Bloomberg

The Northwest Passage

Arctic shipping has ramped up, and by a lot, as the loss of Arctic sea ice has outpaced expectations. This thermodynamic reality is seen as a new wrinkle for shipping companies, which can now ship goods from Pacific ports to Atlantic ports not by dicing the Suez Canal or Panama Canal or Horn of Africa but rather by just going north of Russia, or potentially north of Canada sometime down the line, saving lots of miles of travel. A new report said the number of vessels operating in the Arctic jumped from 1,298 per year in 2013 to 1,782 per year in 2023, and while most of those are still fishing vessels, cargo ships and bulk carries are increasingly using the route. Cargo volumes transported through the Arctic have exploded, from 2.8 million tonnes in 2013 to 36.3 million tonnes in 2023.

Malte Humpert, gCaptain

Friend of the Pod

A new analysis of 434 top-ranked podcasts found that 22 percent have guests regularly and 5 percent almost always have guests, and over 7,000 people made 11,000 guest appearances in the year 2022 on these top-ranked podcasts. However, guest right is not an evenly distributed phenomenon: 78 percent of guests are one-and-done in the set, appearing just once in the year, and that 22 percent who appeared multiple times were responsible for half of all guest appearances.

Galen Stocking and Meltem Odabaş, Pew Research Center

Physical Media

All told, consumers in the U.S. spent $43 billion on home entertainment in 2023, most of which ($37 million) went to streaming services. Of the rest, digital sales of movies and shows were up 5 percent to $2.64 billion and digital rentals were down slightly to $1.69 billion. The rest of the balance, the sliver that remains? That’s discs. Total sales and rentals of DVDs, Blu-rays and 4K Ultra HDs accounted for just $1.56 billion, which was down by a whopping 25.3 percent year over year. The bright spot was Oppenheimer and its 4K Ultra HD release that prompted shortages, but it’s rough in the world of physical media right now.

Thomas K. Arnold, Media Play News

Beans

In a massive decision that will have colossal implications for how food works in the United States and the world as a whole, a federal court in Arizona has ruled that the EPA unlawfully approved the herbicide dicamba for use on emerged soybeans and cotton crops. This is massive, and means that the registrations for Bayer’s XtendiMax, BASF’s Engenia and Syngenta’s Tavium are now vacated, which means that an estimated 40 million acres of soybean and cotton crops that have been engineered to withstand dicamba won’t actually get treated with it, presenting likely issues when it comes to diminished yields. Weeds are a big issue for soybean crops, and soybeans engineered to survive the potent herbicide dicamba can evade the $2 billion in costs that U.S. agriculture incurs from herbicide-resistant weeds. Dicamba is controversial, especially as critics allege that when sprayed from the air it can spread to neighboring crops and kill them.

Rhonda Brooks, AgWeb and Great American Insurance Group

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