You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
11 years old
Last week, at the hacking convention DEFCON, 11-year-old Emmett Brewer hacked into a replica of Florida’s election website, changing its voting results. It took him less than 10 minutes. When I was 11, “Mario Kart 64” had just come out, so yeah, that’s sort of what I was up to. [PBS]
50 eye diseases
Google’s DeepMind, after tackling chess and Go, has helped develop a deep learning AI system that can identify more than 50 eye diseases from 3D scans and recommend treatment. Despite this apparent improvement in diagnoses, I didn’t even know there were more than 50 eye diseases, and thus my dread level has increased. [The Verge]
$289.2 million
On Friday, a California jury found that Roundup and Ranger Pro weed killers were a “substantial danger” to consumers, ordering their maker, Monsanto, to pay close to $300 million to a man with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Studies have produced mixed results about whether glyphospate, the weed killers’ active ingredient, causes cancer. Shares of Bayer, which bought Monsanto in June, dropped sharply on the news, and this case is reportedly “the first of many.” [The Wall Street Journal]
3-run walk-off uncaught third strike
The most beautiful thing about baseball is that despite how many damn games there are, you can still always see something you’ve never ever seen before — and sometimes a thing that no one has seen before. Case in point: The A-league Wisconsin Timber Rattlers overcame a four-run ninth-inning deficit with the help of a two-out, bases-loaded, walk-off, three-run dropped third strike. [Deadspin]
$15,000 a month
Omarosa Manigault Newman, the former senior adviser to President Trump and reality show contestant before that, has a book coming out. (But I mean, come on, who doesn’t?) A string of recordings — including one where she’s fired in the White House situation room — and claims made in the book have been trickling out ahead of its publication. The latest of these is that the Trump campaign offered Manigault Newman a $15,000-a-month job in exchange for her signing a nondisclosure agreement that would have prevented her from discussing in detail her time in the White House. In a break from past administrations, NDAs have been aggressively employed by Trump. [The Washington Post]
0 black senior officials
Manigault Newman was fired eight months ago, and today none of Trump’s senior White House officials are black, according to CNN’s review of 48 such officials. “Only a handful” are of Latino, Asian or Arab descent. Trump’s corps of advisers is “overwhelmingly white.” [CNN]
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