You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news. We’re trying out a new approach, with fewer news items but more detail, so please bear with us.
Also, welcome to the first day of FiveThirtyEight’s third year under ESPN. Yesterday was our 2nd birthday. Didn’t you see everyone partying in green until the A.M.? Yeah that was totally for us.
0 for 124
Based on the low-but-not-zero probability of a 16 seed in the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament beating a 1 seed, by now we’d have expected at least one of them to have won a game. The probability of our current situation — where the record for 16-seeds is 0 for 124 — is only about 5 percent. [FiveThirtyEight]
2 ballistic missiles
North Korea, which just the other day sentenced a University of Virginia student to 15 years of prison and hard labor for allegedly stealing a poster, Friday appears to have shot 2 medium-rangeballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan. They travelled a distance of about 500 miles, according to the South Korean military. [ABC News]
6-12 inches
Because everything is awful and the moment you thought we all had a good thing going is fleeting, a Nor’easter appears to be developing that could very well dump a bunch of snow across the northeast. The New York office of the National Weather service says we can expect 6 to 12 inches from the storm. And just when I had switched from peacoats to hoodies, too. [Slate]
53 percent
It’s the kind of story that you cannot stop reading even though you slowly grow to loathe everyone profiled in it: There’s a huge rise in a group of clothing sales companies aiming to be “Brotailers,” that is, retailers that cater to bros and their ilk. A fashion PR agency found that 53 percent of adult men — adults! — described their style as “basic bro” rather than, say, “practical” or “professional” or whatever else grown men are calling khakis these days to feel cool. Still, men’s fashion has been the fastest growing thing in online retail over the past five years, so there is coin to be made that would otherwise presumably be spent on donating to the old frat, mediocre beer and the Gronk Cruise. [Bloomberg]
76.5 percent fresh
Median Rotten Tomatoes score of movies in which John Goodman is the second-billed performer, which is really good. The guy is at his best when he’s the stalwart #2 of a movie, which means that “10 Cloverfield Lane” doing so well among critics shouldn’t come as a surprise. [FiveThirtyEight]
90 percent sure
King Tut’s tomb may have two new chambers in it, which would be cool because the fella was married and we never did find Nefertiti. Based on a scan of the tomb with radar, Egyptian Antiquities Minister Mamdouh El Damati said that they’re about 90 percent sure they have located an additional 2 chambers. [CNN]
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