![SIGDIG_SOULCYLCLE[1]](https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/sigdig_soulcylcle1.png?w=575)
You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
2nd birthday
Right down to the wire, the Best Story Of July finally dropped: A toddler in Louisiana was so obsessed with the commercials for a local personal injury lawyer named Morris Bart that “Morris” and “Bart” were his second and third words. This kid is into Morris Bart. So when he turned 2, rather than a “Spider-Man” theme or whatever, his parents threw him a party with the theme of local personal injury lawyer Morris Bart. The kid loved it. The party made it into the The Wall Street Journal. This story is amazing. [The Acadiana Advocate]
30 percent
That’s the percentage of Republican voters who said they definitely did not support Donald Trump in his bid for the party’s presidential nomination, according to a Quinnipiac poll. [WHOtv]
95 percent
Percentage of New York residents surveyed who said they had never taken some action to prevent a car theft after hearing a car alarm go off. Spurring people to action is ostensibly the point of car alarms. But the alarms have somewhere between a 95 percent and 99 percent false-positive rate, so they’re pretty much pointless. [Priceonomics]
$240 per day
Big government is trying to bring down a hardworking business yet again: Two children (ages 8 and 10) from Cornwall, in England, were threatened with a $240 daily fine after selling worms on their front porch. (I am totally going to assume selling worms is some longstanding entrepreneurial endeavor for children in the United Kingdom.) [CFRA]
1,000 petaflops
While the Flop Race doesn’t have quite the same ring as the Space Race, an executive order from President Obama has begun an initiative to develop the first exaflop computer. “Flops” are a way to measure computing speed using the number of floating point operations — a type of arithmetic problem — a computer can perform per second. Right now, the best supercomputer on the planet is the 33.86 petaflop Tianhe-2 in China. An exaflop is about 1,000 petaflops, so it’s a lofty goal. [Wired]
16,000 graduates
5,066 people
The number of people — about half of them bystanders, half passengers — who have been killed in the course of U.S. police car chases since 1979. [USA Today]
$10 million
James Woods is suing an anonymous Twitter user for $10 million in a defamation suit over a tweet saying the actor was a cocaine addict. Woods disputes this. First rule of Twitter, everyone: Don’t argue with an egg. Nobody looks good after that. [The Hollywood Reporter]
$112 million
Revenue for SoulCycle in 2014. The company behind the glorified spin class filed documents for an IPO. [Business Insider]
$225.8 million
Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, who previously hosted “Top Gear” for the BBC, have signed on with Amazon to make a new show about cars. The trio’s previous show made an estimated $225.8 million for the BBC in 2014. [CNN Money]
Have a good weekend! If you see a significant digit in the wild, be sure to tweet it to me @WaltHickey.
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