By Walt HickeyHello! I’m back from my honeymoon. Thank you so much to all the excellent writers who stepped up to fill in for me while I was out.
None ReleasedThis past weekend at the box office saw a repeat duel among the top two movies of a tepid Memorial Day weekend, with The Garfield Movie emerging on top with just $14 million, down 65 percent from last year. Holding the film back is the absence of Bill Murray, who presumably could not be tricked into playing the cat again, and the vengeful return of the enemy of both the box office weekend in general and Garfield specifically: Mondays. The issue comes down to a spread-thin release calendar, with last year’s strikes and continued production delays from the pandemic causing pipeline problems for the movie industry. One of the only new releases of the week was Haikyu!! The Dumpster Battle, which adapts the volleyball manga, and though it made $75 million overseas, pulled in only $3.5 million in the U.S. JordanA signed, one-of-a-kind 2003-04 Upper Deck Michael Jordan trading card sold on Saturday for a winning bid of $2.4 million, which after accounting for the 22 percent buyer premium puts the price at $2.9 million. The sale was the result of an auction where there were 38 bids in total. It still well lags the all-time record for trading cards — $12.6 million for a Mickey Mantle 1952 Topps card in 2022 — but is a record for a Jordan card, and shows that the sector is still red hot for collectors.
GenomeA new paper details the New Caledonian fork fern, or Tmesipteris oblanceolate, which has a genome touting 160 billion base pairs of DNA. To be clear, that’s absurd; the human genome has just 3 billion base pairs of DNA, and is considered to be a rather extensive record in and of itself. What precisely a fern is doing walking around (not even!) with 160 billion base pairs is downright mysterious. Ferns, according to researchers, tend to have larger genomes, and plants generally have a little more genomic material than other living things. The size of a genome doesn’t correlate well with anatomical complexity, and ferns tend to have long stretches of repetition. WaterIn the United States there are 50,000 community water systems, and a key question going forward is, really? Do we really need all that? A new forthcoming rule from the EPA would attempt to hasten consolidation in the water business, requiring states to evaluate the systems that routinely fail to meet drinking standards, implementing financial penalties, and giving states the power to matchmake among the water systems to encourage mergers and acquisitions among the water business. Particularly as water systems have to contend with PFAS contamination, and some small operators have to deal with declining funding and a shrinking base of customers, it could be an ideal moment to shrink that 50,000 figure down and have bigger players in the water industry.
Hunts PointThe Hunts Point Produce Market is an invisible but crucial link in the supply chain for New York City’s food business, handling 60 percent of the city’s fresh groceries and $2 billion of fruits and vegetables per year. As a co-op, it’s unique in America where most of that kind of business has been vertically integrated under supermarkets, and it’s the 113-acre main market for buyers and sellers to converge and get the Big Apple its big apples, among other things. The 27 wholesalers are the key middlemen between farms around the world and all the grocers, bodegas and restaurants in the city. It’s also become increasingly awkward in size, with sellers keeping 600 to 800 diesel trucks idling nonstop, polluting the area, and an essential upgrade poised to cost $650 million.
CopperThe three-month forward contract for a tonne of copper hit $11,104.50 on the London Metal Exchange on May 20, the highest level ever, and while it’s since retreated a bit prices are still well north of $10,000. China alone is responsible for half the world’s copper, and renewable energy products need lots of copper. The expectation is that prices are going to remain very high, at least compared to historical levels: Goldman Sachs projects prices will hit $12,000 per tonne before the year is out. HDRHigh dynamic range imagery is seen as the next big thing in cinema technology, offering a wider range of color projections. It’ll see its first test this year, with Inside Out 2, which is getting a version rendered in HDR. There are only about 100 screens in the world that have the right projectors installed at this point — in the U.S., you’re talking a few screens with a Samsung Onyx display in Houston and Los Angeles — but it’ll be an early test to see how audiences respond to the HDR films ahead of a larger rollout in 2025. As it stands, the premium large-format screens have been some of the main winners of the current theatrical era, despite making up a small fraction of the 200,000 cinema auditoriums worldwide, and any new tech seen as providing a superlative theatrical experience has the attention of exhibitors and, hopefully, audiences. 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: The Internationalists · Video Game Funding · BYD · Disney Channel Original Movie · Talon Mine · Our Moon · Rock Salt · Wind Techs · Yeezys · Armed Forces · Christmas Music · The Golden Screen · New York Hotels · A City on Mars · Personality Change · Graphics · You Are What You Watch ·Comics Data · Extremely Online · Kevin Perjurer · Kia Theft Spree · Right to Repair · Chicken Sandwich WarsSunday Edition Archives: 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018
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