You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
5th Amendment
Martin Shkreli, a pharmaceutical executive notorious for cranking up the price of a life-saving anti-parasitic drug from $13.50 per pill to $750, was brought before Congress to testify on drug pricing Thursday. Given that he’s been arrested for securities fraud, Shkreli invoked his Fifth Amendment rights often. He even pleaded the Fifth after being asked about the Wu-Tang Clan album he bought for $2 million. [Digg]
$10 per barrel
Next week, President Obama plans to propose a $10 per barrel charge on oil to fund investments in green tech. The Republican leadership in Congress says this is absurd and definitely doomed. [CNBC]
17 members
The 17 members of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, Pope Francis’s group whose job it is to protect minors in light of the widespread sex abuse from members of the church, watched the Oscar-nominated film “Spotlight” together. The movie is about the Boston area sex abuse scandal and the steps the Roman Catholic Church took to cover it up. [The Guardian]
36 miles
Attention, drone enthusiasts: The Federal Aviation Administration is taking this Super Bowl thing pretty seriously. I know it would be awesome to get an overhead shot of the stadium, but the FAA is going to shoot down your drone if it’s within 36 miles of the stadium in Santa Clara. So avoid that. The no-drone zone includes all of San Francisco, Santa Cruz and San Jose. [Yahoo News]
59 percent
Vegas odds are out for the Super Bowl, and the Carolina Panthers are favored in the game over the Denver Broncos by anywhere from 3.5 to 5.5 points, depending on the book. FiveThirtyEight’s model says Carolina wins this game 59 percent of the time. [FiveThirtyEight, CBS New York]
3,000 copies
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s memoir sold only about 3,000 copies since its release in October 2014, despite an advance of $1 million. For the book, “All Things Possible: Setbacks and Success in Politics and Life,” a paperback is no longer considered possible, and the failure to sell 98.5 percent of the announced 200,000-copy initial print run might be considered a setback. [The Wall Street Journal]
9,000 calories
Jennifer Brunelli is the nutritionist for the Carolina Panthers, and she says that even the smallest players on the team eat around 3,500 calories per day. Some eat more than 9,000 calories per day. [STAT News]
1.3 billion chicken wings
According to Big Chicken, Americans are going to eat 1.3 billion wings on Super Bowl Sunday. When I say Big Chicken, I’m sourcing this to the National Chicken Council, an industrial lobbying group, not a disproportionately large poultry. [Buzzfeed]
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