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Significant Digits For Friday, March 6, 2015

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news. To receive this newsletter in your inbox, subscribe.

27 percent

In a survey for Match.com — a site which kind of has some skin in the game — 27 percent of respondents said that one of their one-night stands had blossomed into a long-term committed relationship. [Nautilus]

36 kilowatts

The military has a death ray. Other people will call it a “prototype high-energy asset,” but Lockheed Martin made a thing that can blast 30 kilowatts of energy into a car with lasers and where I come from, that’s what you call a death ray. [Vice Motherboard]


51 covers

A member of the Bush family has now been on the cover of Time magazine 51 times. This week it’s Jeb’s turn. It’s worth going through each of the covers, since many of them are darkly funny in retrospect. [Time via Zeke Miller]

103 train cars

A train transporting 103 cars worth of crude oil caught fire in rural Illinois and forced the evacuation of everyone within a mile radius. [Associated Press]


3,000 feet

Harrison Ford — who is apparently an accomplished pilot? — crash-landed his vintage plane on a golf course on Thursday, smoothly taking the World War II-era aircraft down 3,000 feet, gracefully hitting only one tree, and landing on the fairway. The national treasure was a little beaten up but otherwise fine. [Associated Press]


3,500 labor hours

Amount of work that went into assembling Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime show lion. [Sports Illustrated]


46,000 tweeters

At least 46,000 Twitter accounts supported the Islamic State on the social messaging service from September to December last year. [The Washington Post]


$2.12 million

Better ingredients, better pizza — loads of wage theft. A New York City Papa John’s franchisee was ordered to pay $2.12 million over hundreds of wage-theft violations involving delivery drivers. [Gothamist]

$40 million

That stupid mobile game with the Kate Upton ads spent $40 million on the four-month campaign. It seems to have paid off: The makers of “Game of War” say they’re pulling in $1 million per day. [Bloomberg Business]


$100 million

Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, where the New York Philharmonic plays, will be renamed after David Geffen following a $100 million donation from the entertainment executive. [The New York Post]


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And, as always, if you see a significant digit in the wild, tweet it to me @WaltHickey.

Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight’s chief culture writer.

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