Numlock News: March 28, 2025 • District 12, Coyotes, Dark Ages
By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend!
District 12
Two parcels of land in Hickey, North Carolina have hit the market, one of them a 43-acre plot listed for $800,000 and the other a 28-acre plot with several buildings for $1.15 million. These are the former site of Henry River Mill Village, a town built along a privately-owned village in 1905. It became a ghost town after the mill closed in 1970 and burned down a few years later. Perhaps most significantly, though, is that the town served as a shooting location for the Hunger Games movies, serving as the stand-in for District 12, indicating that perhaps the sale was potentially timed to capitalize on the Hunger Games buzz.
A Gigantic Pain In The Ass
A doubling of the tariff on Canadian softwood lumber is poised to have major ramifications for American consumers, as the administration weighs levies over 50 percent. Lumber tariffs north of 50 percent will close sawmills in Canada, decimating the supply of the wood chips that become northern bleached softwood kraft pulp, which today sells for $900 per ton. This will hit the United States where it hurts, as NBSK is about 30 percent of your standard bathroom tissue roll, is half of a paper towel roll and the U.S. imported 2 million tons of it from Canada last year.
Mathiew Dion and Thomas Seal, Bloomberg
Ivan The Terra Bus
In 1994, McMurdo Station in Antarctica welcomed a new form of transportation that has become an icon of the facility — a 46-foot long, 12.5-foot wide beast of a bus with 6-foot diameter tires that could transport up to 56 passengers to and from the runways that take researchers off-continent. The machine, manufactured by Canadian manufacturer Foremost, has a turning radius of 160 feet and was given the charming nickname Ivan The Terra Bus after a naming competition. Given that we strand scientists in Antarctica for months on end and isolated people desperately need something to latch on to, the bus has been the subject of songs and legend. Ivan, though, is bound for retirement in New Zealand, as servicing the vehicle has become increasingly expensive and getting supplies to Antarctica — to quote Ernest Shackleton, Frederick George Jackson, Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton again, Douglas Mawson and Ernest Shackleton a third time — notoriously sucks.
Allegra Rosenberg, Atlas Obscura
Coyotes
As urban areas grow and habitats are lost, animals like coyotes are spending more and more time in urban environments and dealing with urban challenges. An ongoing study seeking to learn how urbanization changes coyotes has found that the city coyotes are a bit savvier at problem-solving than their country cousins, according to pipe puzzles deployed for 4 weeks at a time across 26 sites in Edmonton and 14 sites in Elk Island National Park. The puzzles involve a pipe that a coyote must rotate until a treat pops out after passing obstructions, and are meant to gauge their cognition. Across 461 videos of coyotes encountering the puzzle, 140 of them featured interest or interaction, and in 13 videos, the coyote actually solved the puzzle. This is remarkable for the wary animal, and all 13 of them were solved by city coyotes.
Sunrise on the Reaping
Suzanne Collins’ latest book in the Hunger Games franchise is a bona fide hit, with the prequel Sunrise on the Reaping selling 1.2 million copies in its first week of release, smashing expectations and making it the best launch for any Hunger Games book, period. It sold twice as many copies as prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and 3 times as many copies as Mockingjay in 2010. The book paints an intricate fantasy about a world in which deliberate manipulation of mass media can be used to advance a fascist cause.
Middle Ages
The Medieval era is still struggling to beat back the reputation of “the Dark Ages” — a new poll found that just 34 percent of respondents have a favorable view of the Middle Ages. This is compared to 40 percent with a favorable view of Classical Antiquity, 54 percent having a favorable take on The Enlightenment and 62 percent having favorable views of The Renaissance. I must point out that this percentage probably has a lot to do with those all having names that make them sound downright pleasant. Figuring out when they even happened is at times a struggle for Americans — 23 percent think the Middle Ages were still going as late as 1700 AD — but in general, their outputs of castles, chivalry and Gothic architecture all get high marks. In a somewhat delightful outcome, the person with the worst approval rating in the Middle Ages is none other than William the Conqueror, viewed negatively by 23 percent of respondents.
Screens
Movie ticket box office sales were down 23.5 percent last year compared to 2019, and the theater business is trying to figure out what normal actually looks like after the pandemic. One reality is that North America has 5,691 fewer screens than it did before the pandemic, a significant decline in exhibition space that it will be tough to come back from. Even if demand is volatile and exhibition screens are way down, at least this year’s supply will indeed be up: studios are planning to release around 110 movies this year, an increase of about 15 movies compared to 2024.
Brent Lang and Rebecca Rubin, Variety
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A rare serious comment from me. The whole tariff/trade war is utterly asinine. The American government is treating friends like enemies and enemies like friends. And, to what end? We are driving our own economy into the tank with what we are doing. This is so infuriatingly stupid.
To address the city coyotes’ prowess, urban planners are looking to introduce enhanced urban roadrunners.