Welcome to Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
2 kilometers
Last year, Milan, Italy, set the world record for longest pizza at just over 1.5 kilometers, and Naples is hella mad. Chefs in Naples have prepped to make a 2 kilometer pizza containing some two tons of mozzarella (for U.S. residents unfamiliar with the metric system, a kilometer is basically a mile that phoned it in). [NPR]
7-6
That was the score of a baseball game played on Sunday between the Texas Rangers and Toronto Blue Jays. (The Rangers won.) But that scoreline barely scratches the surface of what went down. There were ejections galore, the best punch I’ve ever seen televised and a bench-clearing brawl. You know, basically a boring hockey game. [ESPN]
18.9 percent
Percentage of Americans aged 65 and older who are working, the highest level in decades. [Bloomberg]
More than 4,000 complaints
Las Vegas was hit hard by the Great Recession and the collapse of the housing market. To this day, it is contending with the consequences, including squatters. In 2015, there were more than 4,000 complaints to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department about squatters, up 43 percent compared to 2014. [The New York Times]
50 or more employees
The lower house of the French parliament passed a bill that would make it illegal for companies with 50 or more employees to send emails outside of work hours — namely, after work and on the weekend. [The Washington Post]
38,000 slots
The gaokao is China’s college entrance exam. It is basically the SAT on steroids, the kind of thing kids spend their lives preparing for. So the announcement that 38,000 slots at universities in the wealthy Jiangsu province will be saved for applicants from other, often poorer areas did not go over well. There were demonstrations in multiple cities. “In the provincial capital, Nanjing,” The Wall Street Journal wrote, “parents gathered outside of provincial offices Saturday, shouting, ‘Governor, come out!’ as riot police kept them at bay.” [The Wall Street Journal]
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