You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
8 terms
U.S. Rep. Steve Israel of New York will step down after his eighth term in office. He’s gonna spend a little more time on that novel he’s always wanted to write. No, really! He apparently has an idea for a gun lobby satire. [The New York Times]
10 events
Sen. Ted Cruz appears to be placing a major investment in the South, doing 10 events there in December (excluding South Carolina) out of 16 total. This is fascinating because I’ve personally found that my friends from Canada all generally prefer to stay above the Mason-Dixon line. Must just be me, though! [FiveThirtyEight]
44 percent
Proportion of U.S. workers who don’t have unpaid leave from work, which is useful in such cases as “unanticipated events,” “recovery from illness” or “propagating our species through the miracle of birth.” [Bloomberg]
75.8 percent
Percent of trade history books published in 2015 that had a male author. Quick question, fellas: What do you think you have to say about Erwin Rommel that 2,872 other authors managed to leave unsaid? [Slate]
99.32 percent
Ken Griffey Jr. has received the highest-ever percentage of Baseball Hall of Fame votes. 99.32 percent of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America voted to induct the slugger. [ESPN]
320,000 passwords
Time Warner Cable reported that up to 320,000 customers of the service may have had their email passwords stolen. [Reuters]
570,000 signatures
The U.K. Parliament will consider banning Donald Trump, a U.S. real estate figure, from the United Kingdom following a 570,000-signature petition. This could potentially be the U.K.’s most substantial rebuff of an American politician since that time in “Love, Actually” when Prime Minister Hugh Grant called out the president in that scene with all the references to famous Brits. [Bloomberg]
$524 million
Nobody won last night’s Powerball jackpot, which means that everything is going according to plan for the organization behind Powerball: Last year it adjusted the odds to make the jackpot harder to win in a bid to drive jackpots higher. The new odds could give America its first billion-dollar lottery. [ABC News]
$758.2 million
“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is now the highest-grossing film ever in North America, pulling in $758.2 million and beating out “Avatar,” which was a terrible film that deserves its defenestration from the top spot. [The Hollywood Reporter]
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If you see a significant digit in the wild, send to to me: @WaltHickey.