You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
5th person
Dan Coats, the fifth person to be the Director of National Intelligence, will leave the post next month, President Trump announced in a tweet over the weekend. Trump also said he would nominate John Ratcliffe, representative from Texas, to replace Coats. [Associated Press]
$40 million
“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” Quentin Tarantino’s essentially plotless movie about the late ’60s, Westerns, the Manson Family and people lighting cigarettes, made $40 million from 3,659 North American theaters, a career best for Tarantino. It finished second to “The Lion King” retread, a movie about lions, which pulled in $76 million. [Variety]
4.63 inches of rain
Las Vegas has experienced 4.63 inches of rain this year, well above its typical 2.38 inches. This has occasioned a grasshopper invasion in the desert. On weather radar, it appeared that there were two storms over the city: one was an actual storm, and the other was the “massive hordes of grasshoppers” that have recently made Sin City their new, damp home. [CNN]
1,373 people
Police in Moscow arrested 1,373 people on Saturday in “a violent crackdown on anti-Kremlin protests.” The protestors were pushing back against the barring of opposition party candidates running for Moscow’s city council. The protests there are being described as the largest in a decade. [Vox]
6 injuries
Six people were injured on a British cruise ship bound for Norway in a “mass brawl” involving a 43-year old man, a 41-year-old woman, a “black-tie evening,” “large amounts of alcohol,” and “a passenger taking offence at another holidaymaker dressed as a clown.” While the cruise line denied that there was anyone aboard dressed as a clown, this is basically exactly how I envision all cruises to be, and thus why I remain to this day a land lover. [BBC]
$12.1 million
The 50th anniversary of the moon landing has come and gone, but its ephemera remains big business. Items belonging to one-small-step astronaut Neil Armstrong, put up by his children, have brought in more than $12.1 million during three auctions at Dallas-based Heritage Auctions. These items include a gold commemorative medal, a plaque and a piece of the Wright Brothers’ propellor that Armstrong took to the moon. Another auction is scheduled for November. [Business Insider]
From ABC News:
SigDigs: July 29, 2019
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