Skip to main content
ABC News
Significant Digits For Thursday, Sept. 29, 2016

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


0

Number of television advertisements from Donald Trump that are in Spanish. The Clinton camp is much more invested in bilingual ads. The campaign has sponsored upwards of 2,500 Spanish-language ads. [The Center for Public Integrity]


2 times

An Australian man named Jordan has been bitten by a venomous spider on his penis two times in the past six months. Both incidents occurred on a portable toilet, which I assume he will avoid for the rest of his life. [BBC]


19.36 percent

Hakuna Matata, what a wonderful phrase. Hakuna Matata, Timon probably murdered a sibling in his youth. That’s right, a new study of mammalian murder found that meerkats were most likely to kill their own kind, with 19.36 percent of meerkat deaths inflicted by a member of their own species. [The Atlantic]


21 percent

Percentage of the 1.3 million words spoken by Homer on “The Simpsons” in the program’s first 26 seasons. A further 26 percent was spoken by Bart, Lisa and Marge combined. The main family was followed by Mr. Burns, and then by Moe Szyslak, who is better than dirt. Well, most kinds of dirt, not that fancy store-bought dirt… he and I can’t compete with that stuff. [Todd Schneider]


22.3 births

Teen pregnancy is at a major low; there were 22.3 births for every 1,000 girls 15 to 19 in 2015, down from 61.8 births in 1991. [Vox]


97-to-1

The Senate voted 97-to-1 and the House voted 348-to-77 to override a presidential veto. The bill in question will allow families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia. The situation is complicated, but essentially the move could open up the U.S. to litigation in the future, and could result in Saudi Arabia pulling investments from the U.S. [The New York Times]


You really need to sign up for the Significant Digits newsletter.

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

Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight’s chief culture writer.

Comments