Numlock News: April 8, 2021 • Box Tops, Knives Out, Muons
By Walt HickeyKnives OutA pair of sequels to the hit murder mystery film Knives Out has sold to Netflix for $469 million, a colossal sum for the rights to two followups to the 2019 film. The first movie, which starred Daniel Craig and Ana de Armas, made $311 million on a $40 million budget. This deal will send about $100 million to director Rian Johnson and another $100 million to Craig himself. Craig has said he is moving on from the James Bond franchise following the release of the forthcoming No Time To Die, freeing up his schedule to film Knives Out 2: Presumably Someone Found Time To Die And Now It Is Up To Benoit Blanc To Solve It, working title. CardboardGeneral Mills has transitioned its Box Tops for Education program, which began in 1996 and has since shoveled almost $1 billion to schools from parents and kids who clipped box tops and sent them in to be redeemed for a 10 cent contribution to their school each. Since 2019, the program doesn’t actually require box tops to be sent in, and involves a mediocre mobile app that requires parents to scan receipts. As of 2018, the average payout per school was $750. But school earnings went down by a third in 2020, and consumers are worried that the implicit trade-off — General Mills incentivizing their products in exchange for a charitable rebate — has become quite explicit, with the user information collected by the app giving the conglomerate direct access to myriad consumer data about their customers for a dime at a time. WindOn Monday the United Kingdom saw its National Grid Electricity System log its greenest hour ever, with low carbon energy sources making up 80 percent of the power generation. At 1 p.m. on Monday, carbon pollution for each unit of electricity consumed was just 39 grams of carbon dioxide, the lowest level on record, with wind power supplying 39 percent of the energy mix, solar 21 percent, nuclear 16 percent and biomass 4 percent. Just 10 percent of the power came from gas plants and none from coal. PostgameA new set of projections for the grocery industry point to shifts in what people will be buying in places where the pandemic begins to subside, and what is projected to endure long after. Meat may be in trouble, with the category 50 percent more likely than the average to see a decrease in sales when restaurants reopen, followed by herbs and spices, which are 46 percent more likely to see a drop in sales compared to the rest of the store. Other pandemic hits — condiments, packaged bakery and dairy — may also see hits as people hit restaurants more often and cook at home less. MethA new study offers hope for the approximately 1 million people in the United States who are addicted to methamphetamine, a notoriously difficult addiction to treat. Other addictions like alcoholism or opioid misuse have approved meds to treat them, but meth does not. A new study has found a regimen of two medications has demonstrated promise in terms of treating meth addiction, so much so it’s now become the first line treatment within the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs system. The treatment uses bupropion, which raises dopamine levels and has been prescribed for smokers looking to stop, and naltrexone, an opioid blocker. In a trial with 403 heavy users, 13.6 percent of those who took the medication tested meth-free three quarters of the time during a six-week period, well north of the 2.5 percent given placebos. Claudia Wallis, Scientific American YouTubeAccording to YouTube, during the last quarter of 2020 between 0.16 percent and 0.18 percent of all video views on the platform were of content that broke its rules, which is down 70 percent from the same quarter of 2017. That’s great, but a consideration of the sheer scale of YouTube illustrates the extent to which even a fifth of a percent is still an alarming amount of misinformation, white supremacy, harassment and extremism. There’s over 1 billion hours of YouTube video watched every day, and 0.18 percent of that is still millions of hours of harmful content remaining. Gerrit De Vynck, The Washington Post MuonsParticle physicists have discovered a fascinating little inconsistency with how much the muon subatomic particle wobbles in a magnetic field. The experimental value found a deviation from the current theorized value, a difference of .00000000251. That’s very tiny, but coupled with a 2001 result at Brookhaven National Laboratory, is a 99.997 percent confidence that the observed deviation is not a coincidence. What that specifically means is that there seems to be other forces acting on the muon not in the Standard Model, though it’s just shy of the threshold with which particle physicists are ready to call something a discovery. What it actually means is all your friends who were deeply excited about the Higgs boson now have a new thing to bring up at parties, which is outstanding news given that parties may very well become a thing again. Sabine Hossenfelder, Scientific American and Daniel Garisto, Scientific American The best way to reach new readers is word of mouth. If you click THIS LINK in your inbox, it’ll create an easy-to-send pre-written email you can just fire off to some friends. Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement. 2021 Sunday subscriber editions: Post-pandemic Cities · Facebook AI · Fireflies · Vehicle Safety · Climate Codes · Figure Skating · True Believer · Apprentices · Sports Polls · Pipeline · Wattpad · The Nib · Driven 2020 Sunday editions: 2020 · Sibling Rivalries · Crosswords · Bleak Friday · Prop 22 · NCAA · Guitars · Fumble Dimension · Parametric Press · The Mouse · Subprime Attention Crisis ·Factory Farms · Streaming Summer · Dynamite · One Billion Americans · Defector · Seams of the Grid · Bodies of Work ·2020 Sunday Edition Archive2019 Sunday Edition Archive2018 Sunday Edition ArchiveYou’re on the free list for Numlock News. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. |
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Numlock News: April 7, 2021 • Gas, Cash, Grass
Wednesday, April 7, 2021
By Walt Hickey Cards Topps Co., which makes sports trading cards, will go public through a special purposes acquisition company that values the company at $1.3 billion. The trading card boom has been
Numlock News: April 6, 2021 • Chopper, Ketchup, Yahoo Answers
Tuesday, April 6, 2021
By Walt Hickey Get To The Chopper A 4-pound solar-powered helicopter successfully endured its first nights on Mars, having been deposited by the Perseverance rover ahead of a first planned flight on
Numlock News: April 5, 2021 • Paleobotany, Solar, Godzilla
Monday, April 5, 2021
By Walt Hickey Welcome back! Titans Godzilla vs. Kong made $48.5 million in its first five days over the course of the Easter weekend domestically, the best performance of any film released over the
Numlock News: April 2, 2021 • Lambs, Grizzly Bears, Mr. Brightside
Friday, April 2, 2021
By Walt Hickey Have a great weekend! To hear the audio version of last week's Sunday interview with the brilliant Karen Hao, anyone can check out the Numlock Podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Numlock News: April 1, 2021 • Ghost Cattle, Among Us, Mayor
Thursday, April 1, 2021
By Walt Hickey Public service announcement: because of the date, the internet might be extremely stupid today, so do exercise some extra caution. All of these have been vetted for credibility, but be
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