You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
7th resupply
A SpaceX rocket launch failed Sunday when the rocket appeared to disintegrate about two minutes into the flight. It was SpaceX’s seventh delivery of goods to the International Space Station. [CNN]
53 percent
Airbnb is often times less “bed and breakfast” and more “people just live here.” An analysis of Airbnb in New York found that 53 percent of listings are rented upwards of 60 nights per year and three in ten are managed by people with multiple listings. Funny, that sounds a lot like the job description of a landlord. [Gothamist]
61 seconds
Since the earth is ever so slightly slowing its spin, we need to adjust time based on the atomic clock every now and again through “leap seconds.” On June 30, one of those leap seconds is going to take place. You probably won’t notice. But high frequency traders and financial markets might! So lots of work is going into prepping markets for the 61-second long minute. [Bloomberg]
577 shooting victims
Shootings are up in New York in the first half of the year; 577 people have been shot between January 1 and June 14th. That’s 10 percent higher than the same time period last year. [DNA Info]
3,000
Thousands turned out for the funeral for a cat in Japan that was the honorary stationmaster of a rail station in Kishi. Tama was 16. [The Guardian]
$5,000
Two activists were arrested after removing the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina state house. They were charged with defacing a monument and could have to pay fines of up to $5,000 or spend three years behind bars. Filmmaker Michael Moore has offered to pay any fines and legal costs for the pair. [Michigan Live]
80,000 volts
New technology behind stun cuffs — which are a pair of handcuffs that can be remotely triggered to give a severe electric shock to the wearer — is raising a lot of questions about how much the prison system should look like a dystopian novel from the ’50s. [The Atlantic]
237,000 rental units
There are 237,000 rental units in San Francisco. About 72 percent of them are rent controlled. That’s nice, because rent in San Francisco is absolutely bananas and liable to rapid rises. But if you’re one of the 28 percent, you are doomed to a wretched existence bound only to the whims of a real estate market content to devour itself. [San Francisco Chronicle]
$1.8 billion
That’s the payment Greece has to make to the IMF on Tuesday. It is not looking good. [BBC]
$73 billion
Forget Greece — Puerto Rico, the U.S. territory, has its own debt crisis. The territory owes $73 billion, has a sluggish economy, and is going to have to negotiate its way out of a potential default as several potentially crippling bond payments are on the horizon. [The Guardian]
CORRECTION (June 29, 8:19 a.m.): An earlier version of this post wrote that Greece owed the IMF $1.6 billion. That’s the amount of euros it owes; the dollar amount is $1.8 billion.
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Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight’s chief culture writer. @WaltHickey
