You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
$500
Flipping off a cop carries a fine of up to $500 in Indiana, but one bold First Amendment fan is suing the state for unspecified damages after being slapped with a ticket for giving the middle finger to a cop who cut him off. [USA Today, The Tribune Star of Terre Haute]
1,897.5 mL
Estimate for how much, on average, an NFL player sweats over the course of a game. So, for Super Bowl LII, that would translate to something like 11 gallons of sweat in aggregate. [Popular Science]
2,600 pounds of marijuana
That’s the amount of Oregon-grown marijuana intercepted by postal agents. Marijuana is not only legal in Oregon, but it is evidently in such abundance that manufacturers can’t get it off their hands quick enough. The state is producing three times as much marijuana as Oregonians can consume. [The Independent]
$400,000
Amount remaining in the campaign account of former U.S. Rep. Robin Tallon Jr. of South Carolina. He invested it and ended up with about $1 million. And then, in 2005, Tallon began spending that money on reimbursements to himself and family members, a widespread practice among former members of Congress. [The Tampa Bay Times]
$233.1 million
Amount generated by the Empire State Building in the first nine months of 2017. Only $5.6 million of that came from retail space, down from $7.2 million the year before. The Empire State Building, much like New York as a whole, has a glut of vacant commercial real estate. [Bloomberg]
$955 billion
President Trump’s tax cuts are already affecting America’s balance sheet: The U.S. Treasury projects that the government will borrow $955 billion this fiscal year, up from the $519 billion it borrowed last year. The cause: lower tax receipts. [The Washington Post]
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If you see a significant digit in the wild, send it to @WaltHickey.