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Significant Digits For Thursday, May 9, 2019

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.


More than 1,000 families

The deadly Camp Fire in California burned six months ago, and more than 1,000 families are still looking for housing. The fire exacerbated an already severe housing shortage and growing homelessness crisis in rural northern California. [NPR]


At least 10 cities

A group of Uber and Lyft drivers in at least 10 American cities — including New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Atlanta, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles — went on strike Wednesday, protesting “unfair wages and exploitative pay policies.” The action comes ahead of Uber’s expected $90 billion — i.e., more than the GDP of Luxembourg or Guatemala — IPO this week. [Curbed]


17 federal prisoners

Kim Kardashian West has helped free 17 federal prisoners in the past few months. Kardashian West, who has said she’s been studying for the bar exam, has also met with President Trump at the White House to discuss criminal justice reform. [BuzzFeed News]


+35 PARS

Earlier this week saw the reintroduction of our Popularity Above Replacement Governor scores (or PARG) and now we have Popularity Above Replacement Senator scores (or PARS). Just like PARG, PARS is calculated by taking the difference between a politician’s net approval rating and her state’s partisan lean. Topping the PARS list is Joe Manchin of West Virginia at +35; at the bottom is Mitch McConnell of Kentucky at -36. [FiveThirtyEight]


4.6 billion years ago

A team of astrophysicists analyzing meteorite isotopes and simulations of the Milky Way have determined some valuable metals — including gold and platinum — were created by a collision between two neutron stars 1,000 light years away and 4.6 billion years ago. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, we, and our jewelry, are star stuff. [CNET]


34,300 cases

The ongoing measles outbreaks are not limited to the United States. The World Health Organization has reported 34,400 cases in Europe in the first two months of 2019 — triple last year’s count. Thirteen measles deaths were also reported, in Albania, Romania and Ukraine. [CNN]


Love digits? Find even more in FiveThirtyEight’s book of math and logic puzzles, “The Riddler.”

If you see a significant digit in the wild, please send it to @ollie.


Oliver Roeder was a senior writer for FiveThirtyEight. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied game theory and political competition.

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