Welcome to Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
3 brackets
The guy who currently has the best NCAA men’s tournament bracket on Yahoo, James Kiki, forgot to pick a winner. This means there’s no way he can win the $50,000 prize for best bracket. It appears this isn’t a unique situation: of the top 30 brackets on Yahoo, three of them did not pick a champ. [Deadspin]
29 percent
Drop over the past year for Chipotle Mexican Grill stock, which may have a thing or two to do with, you know, all that food-borne illness. Despite the meltdown in the main business, Chipotle apparently filed a trademark this month for a new chain called “Better Burger.” That isn’t just going back to the drawing board, it is going back to Ray Kroc’s drawing board. [Bloomberg]
52 percent
Using the top daily story on Memeorandum, a political news aggregator, as a proxy for what the top political news story of the day is, Donald Trump has led the news on 104 of the 286 days between when he launched his campaign and this past Sunday. That’s 36 percent of the time. When the top political story was about the campaign, Trump has owned 52 percent of the political news days. Sad! [FiveThirtyEight]
988 delegates
Barring a massive victory in New York, Bernie Sanders is running out of ways to win the Democratic nomination. He’s 988 delegates away from a majority, and even now you really have to twist the math and throw spaghetti at the wall in order to plot a conceivable path in which he wins the nomination. [FiveThirtyEight]
21,764 households
Number of households in New York City that reported incomes over $1 million in 2013, which is 47 percent higher than the level in 2009. On the other hand, 54,348 households reported income that was less than $0, but do not feel bad for all of them: some could be savvy people who managed to make their income appear negative on paper despite otherwise large capital gains. [The New York Times]
$312 million
A 35 billion yen ($312 million) project to construct a refrigeration structure around the Fukushima nuclear site — which was damaged by a tsunami and earthquake in 2011 — is going to be switched on soon. The refrigerator creates an underground wall of frozen soil to prevent contaminated water from getting into the local groundwater. I assume that once activated this frozen wall will be defended by the proud men of the Night’s Watch. [TIME]
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