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Significant Digits For Friday, April 27, 2018

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.

3 counts

Bill Cosby was found guilty on three counts of aggregated indecent assault Thursday for drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at his home in a suburb of Philadelphia in 2004. The counts carry up to 10 years in prison each, which means the 80-year-old Cosby could spend the rest of his life behind bars. [CNN]


20 percent

Arizona teachers walked out on Thursday with tens of thousands of teachers amassing in Phoenix to demand that school funding be restored to pre-Recession levels plus a 20 percent pay raise for teachers and raises for support staff. There were also widespread teacher demonstrations in Colorado as well. [The Associated Press]


400.4 arrests

Among states that are not ridiculously small population wise — specifically Wyoming, which is No. 1 — New Jersey comes out as having the highest per-capita marijuana arrest rate, with 400.4 arrests for marijuana possession or distribution for every 100,000 people. Only New York and Texas, each of which is far more populated than Jersey, had a higher total number of marijuana arrests in 2016. [NJ Advanced Media]


1,250 Americans

That’s the number of American civilians, contractors and military personnel stationed at the Pentagon base on Roi-Namur, an atoll in the Marshall Islands. Rising sea levels plus the low-lying height of the island prompted research showing that the island’s aquifers are in more danger of saltwater contamination than previously known due to climate change. [The Washington Post]


133,995 pallets

Scattered across America are “at least six” secret stockpile warehouses containing more than 133,995 pallets worth of medical countermeasures that can be deployed to an area of the country rapidly to contend with a chemical, nuclear or biological attack or incident. A preconfigured cache of 50 tons of antibiotics, syringes, oxygen tubing and more exists that can be loaded into a plane and delivered in 12 hours. [The Washington Post]


Over 5 billion

Coins worth 10 rupees — about 15 cents — are in a state of crisis in India, where more than 5 billion have been minted since 2010. The issue is that there is an inaccurate perception that the coins are easily and regularly counterfeit, meaning that banks and merchants are resistant to accepting them. One source of the confusion is that there are 14 different versions of the coin, leading to misunderstandings and rumors. [The Wall Street Journal]


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Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight’s chief culture writer.

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