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Significant Digits For Thursday, April 30, 2015

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6 attendees

The previous record for lowest attendance at a professional baseball game, set in 1882, according to the official historian of the league. A Baltimore Orioles-Chicago White Sox game Wednesday was closed to the public because of public unrest in Baltimore, ostensibly smashing that record. [FiveThirtyEight]

16 months

Anonymous sharing app Secret is closing down after 16 months, so we’re all going to have to take our spiteful remarks about others back to Twitter accounts with egg avatars. [Medium]

16.5 mistakes per 100 words

Just when you thought Washington couldn’t be worse at anything than selecting quarterbacks, a proofreading company analyzed Internet comments to find out which NFL fan base had the worst spelling and grammar. Fans of the Detroit Lions were the best of the bunch, with only 4.2 spelling or grammar mistakes per 100 words, while fans of the Washington, D.C., area football team were the worst, with 16.5 errors per 100 words. [Wall Street Journal]

80 percent

There’s an HIV outbreak in Indiana, and it’s being fueled by intravenous drug use. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of the first 135 incidents found that 80 percent of those who contracted HIV were intravenous drug users and that every user had tried the painkiller Opana. [Medium]


407-105

That was the (as yet unofficial) final vote count from members of the Newspaper Guild of New York to rename their union the NewsGuild of New York. [Jim Romenesko]


1,100

Number of foreign donors that the Clinton Foundation has not disclosed, according to Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra, a co-founder of the foundation’s Canadian affiliate. [Bloomberg]


$700,000 per episode

The streaming rights to the 180 episodes of the television show “Seinfeld” were sold to Hulu for an estimated $700,000 per episode. I’m personally thrilled for the creators Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld as the creation of the film “Bee Movie” convinced me that the latter had become desperate for cash. [Wall Street Journal]

$42 million

That’s Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s total compensation from last year, making her the S&P 500’s highest-paid female executive. [USA Today]


100 million kilometers

We’re getting more pictures of Pluto, the underdog champ of our solar system. The snapshots were taken April 12-18, when the New Horizons space probe was about 100 million kilometers away from the planetary body deemed far too awesome to be a planet*. [Slate]
* It’s been awhile, and I don’t really remember why Pluto was dumped, but this seems reasonable.

$138 million

Total advertising revenue of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority last year. On Wednesday, the agency decided to ban political advertisements, which accounted for $1 million of that. This from an agency that just shoved a fare hike down a local lifestyle writer’s goddamn throat. [The New York Times]


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Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight’s chief culture writer.

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