By Walt Hickey

Hello! Today marks a year since the release of my book, You Are What You Watch. Thanks so much to everyone who bought it, gifted it, and reviewed it! If you haven’t picked it up, its first day off frontlist is a great place to start. The book is available wherever books are sold, at your local bookstore, and in audiobook form!

Mine Fires

The state of New Mexico has announced that it’s successfully extinguished two fires that had been burning in abandoned coal mines since at least 2011, and possibly far longer, which have been emitting toxic gasses. A fire at the mine Navajo No. 1 broke out in 1891 and was sealed in 1905, but it’s actually unclear if the mine was properly extinguished as a fire was spotted in it over 100 years later. About $12 billion was allocated by the federal infrastructure law for mine remediation, $36 million of which went to New Mexico, and extinguishing the two fires cost about $385,000 to dig out coal seams that were burning and then fill them with benign material that won’t burn. In a twist, the pair of mine fires are far from the only ones on fire in New Mexico, as the state announced there are at least five other coal mine fires actively burning and which have been doing so for years.

Patrick Lohmann, Source NM

Tok Split

There are 27 million people in the United States who get paid to post, and 44 percent of them said social media is their full-time job. Overall, advertisers paid content creators $26 billion in 2023. The accounts are inherently valuable, and lots of them are just everyday people, couples, and families who make a living through the accounts. A new inevitability, though, is that sometimes those couples split up and those photogenic families experience a divorce, and how to appropriately value the accounts — let alone how to carry on with relatable content creation following the dissolution of the relationship that accrued such an audience — is an emerging question.

Katherine Hamilton, The Wall Street Journal

Acoustics

Scientists are tapping into AI-powered tech platforms such as BirdNET, which can be deployed into the environment to monitor for the sounds of bird species of interest. In one study of marbled murrelets in northern Canada, BirdNET was able to identify 20 percent to 60 percent more species than a human listener. Beyond the murrelets, throughout the Pacific Northwest, researchers are processing audio from 80 species across a million square kilometers which, in 2023 alone, generated 2 million hours of sound. That’s considered to be just the beginning of the potential of these devices and systems.

Moira Donovan, Hakai Magazine

Polyphyrion

Named after a giant from Greek mythology, a stream of magnetized plasma called Porphyrion is being shot out of a supermassive black hole. It’s difficult to comprehend, but this stream of plasma spans the length of 140 Milky Way galaxies, the single largest black hole jet ever detected by physicists, according to a new paper published in Nature. The jets are formed when matter accumulates around a black hole that isn’t able to consume it fast enough, and things begin to get extremely weird based on the incomprehensible physics of that much matter around that kind of unique gravitational situation. The survey that found Porphyrion identified over 10,000 massive black hole jets systems, after surveying just 15 percent of the sky.

Saima S. Iqbal, Scientific American

Harry Potter and the Cursed Run Time

The play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child hit the road in America last month, kicking off in Chicago ahead of a national tour. That touring production cut 40 minutes from the run time of the Broadway edition, which is wild, because the current version on Broadway has already been cut down substantially from the initial run time. When it launched in London in 2016 and then New York in 2019, the run time of this play was 5 hours and 15 minutes, spread over two nights. In 2021, the New York show cut that down to 3 hours and 30 minutes. The thing is, the 40 minutes that got cut are actually being applied to Broadway, too: Starting November 12, the New York show will be cut down to 2 hours and 50 minutes, to match the successful touring run. This moment is especially vindicating for the “Harry Potter desperately needed an editor at a certain point” crowd, which heretofore was limited to posing questions like, “Why do the turntables never come up again?” or, “Why is the last sentence of this beloved children’s franchise the main character, Harry Potter, asking his slave to make him lunch?”

Blake Taylor, Attractions Magazine

Halloween

A new survey asked Americans what they were going to wear for Halloween, and my god we have lost track of the reason for the season, moving well beyond dressing up as an animal or a witch and far, far into the conceptual. While 44 percent are going as a “fictional person or character” and 19 percent going as “an animal or creature,” fully 16 percent are going as “a concept,” in clear violation of the fundamental principle of cosplay where if you have to label your costume, you are not wearing a costume. That said, we are hitting disastrously low levels for the “sexy” Halloween costume, which fell to 13 percent this year.

Jamie Ballard, YouGov

Lost City

A new lidar analysis of an interesting region 5 kilometers away from a small medieval urban area called Tashbulak in eastern Uzbekistan found evidence for a far larger settlement than was previously known to exist along the Silk Road route at that point. The new area of interest, known locally as Tugunbulak, was scanned by low-flying drones hauling lidar 22 times, and managed to find the mother lode: They found 120 hectares of a city, already half the size of ancient Samarkand, containing a 30-hectare area which might have had as many as 5,000 residents in over 300 structures.

Andrew Lawler, Science

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