By Walt HickeyHave a great weekend!
CommandersThe NFL’s Washington Commanders cut a controversial deal with D.C. to bring the club back to the defunct RFK Stadium, with the city committing to directly spend $1.14 billion of public money on the new stadium. That last part has some throwing flags on the play, arguing that such a sum from municipal coffers go build a single-use stadium is way too much; the funds include $202 million for infrastructure costs, $89 million for a SportsPlex facility, $500 million to subsidize the stadium and $356 million for a parking garage. Some critics allege the true cost is likely even higher, including the 90 acre lease for $5 per year on land in a city where things go for $6.6 million per acre, $429 million in waived property taxes, $300 million in redirected sales taxes, and $623 million in bond interest. Hal Connolly, Nick Sementelli and Alex Baca, Greater Greater Washington
ChessA newer and faster format of chess has attracted top global talent: USA vs. India in October, an event that will take place outside of Dallas and features matches only allowing 10 minutes per side, vastly faster than the classical hours-long marathons. The event hopes to sell 2,500 tickets and also put chess on the map when it comes to media rights, given the surge in interest seen. Chess.com’s daily active users rose from 1.5 million in February 2020 to 11 million as of April 2023. A 2024 FIDE World Championship featured a star turn from champion Gukesh Dommaraju — who will be a star of the Dallas event — and was the third-ever chess event to pass the milestone of 500,000 simultaneous online viewers. Such numbers indicate that with a little bit of effort, chess can compete with sports broadcasts with the right organization. WallsThe past three decades have seen an era of previously unseen security-driven ecosystem destruction, with the construction of border walls that are jeopardizing populations of wild animals. There are now an estimated 74 border walls globally, up from just six in 1989, and they’re not just splitting countries: a new study found that the 32,000 kilometers of border walls installed globally obstruct the ranges of over 700 species of mammals. The U.S.-Mexican border wall alone bisects the ranges of 120 mammals and genetically fragmented species. Take one example, the lynxes of the Białowieza Forest that are now split up by a 186-kilometer wall separating Belarus and Poland, with the 15 lynxes left on the Polish side now in a genetic bottleneck.
AdsThe early promise of streaming services — ad-free on-demand subscriptions for a host of media — is increasingly dying, as those services turn the ad business back on. As it stands, according to the latest data from Nielsen, 72.4 percent of television use was ad-supported, with streaming responsible for 42.4 percent of all ad-supported television use. This would imply that ad-supported streaming is responsible for something like 30.7 percent of all television use, which would be the lion’s share of the 43.3 percent of television use that is devoted to streaming. Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter
Koji MoldMuch like the domestication of dogs and cats, humans have also domesticated fungi, including taming the mold Aspergillus oryzae in China about 9,000 years ago. This is the star player behind the fermentation of soy sauce, but it wasn’t always a helpful mold, as the wild version creates lots of toxins capable of poisoning people and causing liver cancer, causing millions of dollars in crop damage per year. No, we domesticated this fungus and made it our own, splitting it from the hazardous A. flavus by stripping its ability to make aflatoxin. We specifically bred the fungus into a safe form, deleting crucial parts of the gene cluster producing aflatoxin, rendering it harmless and able to serve as the first step in making soy sauce. This was achieved by not just using spontaneous colonization of A. oryzae to ferment foods, but by specifically using the dregs of a previous successful fermentation to start the new one. The process is not unlike a sourdough starter, a process which was even written about in a 2,300-year-old Chinese text. Rachel Ehrenberg, Knowable Magazine KosmosIn 1972, the Soviet Union launched the Kosmos-482 mission, which was likely headed to Venus (the Soviets kept quiet about the intended destination of space probes until they were successful). A timer anomaly scuttled the mission in Earth orbit, where it has been for the past 50 years. What goes up eventually comes down, and it appears that the satellite — orbiting us once every 90 minutes — will crash into Earth sometime on or around May 10 somewhere over a wide swath of territory ranging from 52 degrees north to 52 degrees south latitude. David Dickinson, Universe Today CocoaProblems with the cocoa supply are feared to be getting worse amid quality control problems in Ivory Coast, which is the main global supplier of cocoa beans. The mid-crop harvest is now underway, a harvest period that tends to produce tinier beans processed locally into cocoa butter, but indications appear that this harvest’s crop is unexpectedly of low quality. The main crop of cocoa is typically about one percent poor quality per truckload. However, this mid-harvest has increased to 5-6 percent of cocoa, with some truckloads coming in 15 percent low quality, becoming an issue in a business that has suffered back-to-back annual shortages. Baudelaire Mieu, Bloomberg News This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Ross Benes, the author of the new book 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times. I’m fascinated by the impact that pop culture has on our society, and one thing I’ve always taken seriously is that it’s not just the works that serve as the heights of our societal creative output — the Oscar winners, the prestige television, the prize-winning novels — that reflect and change our society. The book is available wherever books are sold. Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today. 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. Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Traffic Cam Photobooth · Money in Politics · Sax Solo · Terra Nova · Didion · Me, But Better · Flow · Four Nations · Tabletop · Fortnite · Sleep · Climate Insurance · Work/Life Balance · Self-Driving · Geoglyphs · Nvidia · McDonald’s · No Such Thing · Nationalized Sports ·Pop and Politics · Horror Boom · MCU · Fanfiction · User Magazine · Reentry · Panda Dunks · Net Zero · Spiraled · On The Edge ·Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018
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