Significant Digits For Thursday, Feb. 19, 2015

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19 stunt people

There’s been a push for the Academy Awards to create a technical award for Hollywood stunt performers for decades, but the lobby is somewhat hampered by numbers: Only 19 of the roughly 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were stunt people in 2011. [A.V Club]

76 percent of Republicans

George W. Bush left the White House with abysmal approval ratings, but even then, a majority of Republicans approved of his foreign policy performance. Now, as Jeb Bush gears up for a presidential run sounding a lot like his brother on foreign policy, the GOP remains plenty hawkish; 76 percent of Republicans think military force will be needed to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. [FiveThirtyEight]

73 companies

Number of startups with a valuation over $1 billion according to venture capitalists. Of the 73 companies, 23 make software, 13 work in e-commerce and 13 are consumer-oriented Internet services. [The Wall Street Journal]

450 calories per slice

Little Caesars has unveiled a new pizza with 3.5 feet of bacon wrapped around its crust. At 450 calories per slice, the crust is beautiful and terrible as the morning and the night, the pie as fair as the sea and the sun and the snow upon the mountain, dreadful as the storm and the lightning, stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love it and despair! It costs $12. [USA Today]

800 acts of emotional manipulation and casual cruelty

It seems like every year some college or university mistakenly tells a bunch of rejected applicants that they’ve been accepted. This year, it was Carnegie Mellon University. The school, which is supposed to be good at tech, e-mailed 800 anxious applicants on Monday to tell them they were accepted into a master’s program in computer science. They were not. [Bloomberg Business]

$1,930.60

That was the average price on the secondary market for tickets to the Duke vs. University of North Carolina basketball game last night. [Forbes]

50,000 bitcoins

The U.S. government will auction off roughly $12 million worth of the digital currency bitcoin seized in the bust of the Silk Road, a drug-trafficking website. [The New York Times]

$300,000

VICE founder Shane Smith is reported to have dropped $300,000 on a single dinner in Las Vegas. There are conflicting accounts of the size of the party that racked up the mighty bill; reports range from 12 to 25 people. What could they possibly have ordered? I mean, for $300,000 I would probably let someone “Most Dangerous Game” me. [Bloomberg Business]

700,000 cartons of cigarettes

New York (state and city) brought a lawsuit against UPS on Wednesday for allegedly shipping 700,000 cartons of cigarettes from Native American land upstate, where tobacco is not taxed, to the rest of the state. This meant about $35 million in lost tax revenue. [Huffington Post]

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