By Walt Hickey

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Mega Televisions

From January to September, there were 38.1 million televisions sold with a width of at least 97 inches, or just over 8 feet. The massive televisions are taking off, in no small part because prices have dropped significantly; the first 98-inch television from Samsung was introduced in 2019 at a price of $99,000, and this year it’s got four models starting at $4,000. The average price of a television over 97 inches fell from $6,662 last year to $3,113 this year. Don’t look now, but there are models 110 inches to 115 inches hitting the market right now.

Anne D’Innocenzio, The Associated Press

Here

The last time Robin Wright, Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis teamed up for a movie spanning the arc of the 20th century, they made Forrest Gump, which was the second-highest-grossing movie of 1994 (behind The Lion King) and also won Best Picture. This new time, adapting the graphic novel Here in an audacious and technically-driven film, it’s not doing particularly great: The movie opened in fifth place for $5 million, a rough opening for a $45 million budget, but honestly Robert Zemeckis has enough money to do whatever he wants and good for him.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Ice

High-quality, pure ice made by Kanazawa has gone globally successful, with about 300 bars and restaurants in the United States buying ice from the Japanese company and getting it shipped directly here. Sales specifically to the United States were 10 million yen in 2020 but hit 70 million yen last year, which drove the specialized ice company’s sales to 242 million yen (about $1.6 million). The market for ice manufacturers in Japan is shrinking, with the number of companies in the business halving from 2017 to 2022, when 672 stayed in business, leading Kanazawa to follow the increasingly familiar playbook of pushing the highest-quality product and selling it abroad.

Keijiro Goto, Nikkei Asia

Telesco

A robot has successfully made it into the core of one of the three damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The robot is the first of hopefully many to journey into the facility which suffered a meltdown in 2011 following a tsunami strike. The bot recovered a piece of radioactive slag as big as 5 millimeters from a mound of molten fuel debris. The sample will be analyzed, and what they find out will direct the plans for a 30- to 40-year cleanup of the 880 tons of radioactive molten fuel and decommissioning of the plant.

Mari Yamaguchi, The Associated Press

Ratings

NFL national ratings are steady this year, which is the best that can be hoped for in an election year. However, local market television ratings are down for 25 out of the 32 teams through the eighth week of play. Teams that are beating their local viewership include the Houston Texans (up 36 percent) and Detroit (up 10 percent). On the other hand, the league is losing viewership in some crucial metro areas, in no small part owing to the abysmal play of the teams and the doomed trajectories of the franchises. In no city is this as obvious as New York City: The Giants and the Jets have seen the single largest declines in the entire league and lead their respective divisions in terms of local fan tune-out, with the Jets down 32 percent and the Giants down 33 percent year over year in terms of local viewership.

John Ourand, Puck

Green Bank

The National Radio Quiet Zone is a 13,000-square-mile region of West Virginia and Virginia where there are restrictions on radio signals and cellular signals and, in some areas, any electronic device that may emit even low amounts of radio interference. The 11 counties have 262,296 residents and are in the vicinity of sites like the Green Bank Observatory and scientific and military work that depends on signal-less skies. This is annoying for residents, but after three years of engineering from government agencies in the region and SpaceX, there is now Starlink satellite internet available for 99.5 percent of residents in the NRQZ, in 42 of the 46 cell areas around the Green Bank Observatory.

Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica

Infinite Monkeys

A new study sought to actually figure out how right the adage is that if given an infinite amount of time, a monkey on a typewriter will eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare. In yet another instance of “infinity is really very hard to contemplate,” the study found that a random primate at a keyboard clicking one key per second only has a 5 percent chance of writing the word “bananas” within its own lifetime, and anything more sophisticated like “I chimp, therefore I am” has a chance of one in 10 million billion billion. Indeed, the paper argues, the global population of 200,000 chimpanzees grinding at the problem would almost certainly experience the heat death of the universe before pulling off that brief five-word sentence, and even pulling off Curious George would take untold repetitions of the heat death of the universe to chip away at any meaningful chunk.

Hannah Ritchie, BBC News and Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta, ScienceDirect

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