You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the spoooooooky numbers tucked inside the news. Happy Halloween. That’s the best I got.
7 percent
Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha, Mitsui O.S.K. and Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha are merging container operations. They’re the three largest shipping companies in Japan, and by the time the deal is done by July the combined company will run 256 ships and 7 percent of the world shipping market by volume. [The New York Times]
23 penalties
The Oakland Raiders set a new NFL record Sunday for penalties in a single game, racking up 23 that cost them 200 yards. The good news? They were going up against the Tampa Bay Bucs, so they won anyway. [ESPN]
42 years
A man who checked out William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” in April 1974 from the Guilderland Library returned the book last Tuesday. The late fee for such a wait would be $3,106.20, but a man such as this presumably knows to live a life on the run, dodging the law and other library enforcement authorities, and presumably set up the book drop up so they’d be sipping a cocktail on a brach in Zihuatanejo, Mexico by the time anyone was all the wiser to his escape from New York. [NBC New York]
76 percent
The Chicago Cubs saved their chances of winning the World Series by winning Game 5 of the seven-game series Sunday night. The Cleveland Indians are one game away from winning the series, the Cubs need two wins, and they’re rather evenly matched. The FiveThirtyEight MLB Elo model gives Cleveland a 76 percent chance of winning it all and the Cubs a 24 percent chance. [FiveThirtyEight]
$10 million
Donald Trump has put a further $10 million into his campaign in the last days before election day, making his total investment in his bid for the presidency more than $66 million. As of two weeks ago, the campaign only had $16 million on hand. [POLITICO]
$70 million
A California woman was awarded $70 million after bringing a lawsuit claiming that Johnson & Johnson was negligent in making its talcum powder, arguing it caused her ovarian cancer. The International Agency for Research on Cancer said that using talc on genitals is potentially cancer-causing, but the science appears not to be definitive quite yet. [CBS News]
You really need to sign up for the Significant Digits newsletter.
If you see a significant digit in the wild, send it to @WaltHickey.