Skip to main content
ABC News
Significant Digits For Monday, April 6, 2015

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

Saturday saw what’s been described as the shortest lunar eclipse of the century, a five-minute “blood moon” seen best on the West Coast. [CNN]

18 years

Sentence for Kevin Bollaert, who was convicted of extortion for running a “revenge porn” website. [NBC San Diego]


27 states

At least 34 states must agree in order to call a constitutional convention. Twenty-seven have signed on to call for one regarding a balanced budget amendment, and campaigns are under way in nine more. [The Washington Post]

28 years in prison

Anthony Ray Hinton was set free Friday after spending 28 years on Alabama’s death row. New ballistics tests contradicted the evidence that put him behind bars for two 1985 murders. [The Guardian]

53 percent

According to FiveThirtyEight’s march madness model, that’s the University of Wisconsin’s chance of winning the NCAA Men’s tournament Monday night against Duke after dropping the undefeated University of Kentucky on Saturday. Should Wisconsin win, they very well may vindicate the “just pick the cutest mascot” bracket methodology I promoted at the start of this all. Go Badgers. [FiveThirtyEight]

1.4 million copies

Global sales of illustrator Johanna Basford’s “Secret Garden,” a coloring book intended for adults, so far. The book and a followup, “Enchanted Forest,” are at the top of Amazon’s sales list. [The Guardian]

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

Domestic haul for “Furious 7,” the latest film in the “Fast and Furious” franchise. [USA Today]

$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.

Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight’s chief culture writer.

Comments