You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news. To receive this as an email newsletter, please subscribe.
5 minutes
18 years
Sentence for Kevin Bollaert, who was convicted of extortion for running a “revenge porn” website. [NBC San Diego]
27 states
28 years in prison
53 percent
1.4 million copies
2 million hours
Amount of time the professional services firm Deloitte spends each year evaluating the performance of its more than 65,000 employees. That’s time spent “completing the forms, holding the meetings, and creating the ratings.” [Harvard Business Review]
$143.6 million
$4.8 billion
The size of the Chinese box office last year. The country adds about 15 new theaters every day and is a rising economic force in the motion picture industry. [The New York Times]
13 trillion electronvolts
The Large Hadron Collider is back and running again after a two-year rebuild. While they’re taking it easy on the atom-smasher for the time being, scientists plan to crank it up to 13 trillion electronvolts — double the peak achieved last time around — over the next few months. [BBC]
If you haven’t already, you really need to sign up for the Significant Digits newsletter — be the first to learn about the numbers behind the news.
And, as always, if you see a significant digit in the wild, tweet it to me @WaltHickey.