You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
It would be a huge help if you participated in FiveThirtyEight contributor James England’s crowdsourced Oscar model.
3.5 percent
The Trump administration will project gross domestic product growth of 3 to 3.5 percent a year when touting the economic impacts of proposed legislation, which is considerably higher than estimates from independent and nonpartisan agencies as well as private-sector economic forecasters. Recent economic growth has been around 2 percent, and economists consider growth above 3 percent very difficult to sustain. [The Wall Street Journal]
14 percent
A Johns Hopkins University, Harvard and Boston Children’s Hospital study found that suicide attempts of lesbian, gay and bisexual teenagers dropped 14 percent when their state legalized same-sex marriage. [The Guardian]
277 egregious errors
Columbia University accidentally sent out acceptance emails to 277 prospective graduate students, which it later rescinded. One would think a university typically considered prestigious would be capable of sending an email, but alas, Columbia joins MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Tulane, Fordham and more in the club of universities that have screwed this up. [The New York Times]
5,500 pounds
SpaceX successfully launched nearly 5,500 pounds of supplies bound for the International Space Station and subsequently recovered the spent rocket booster Sunday at Cape Canaveral in Florida. [The Guardian]
$4 billion
Amount spent by Coca-Cola on advertising last year. The company is changing the My Coke Rewards program — those codes inside of bottle caps — and the dedicated group of rewards program obsessives is freaking out. [Bloomberg]
$143 billion
Kraft Heinz Co. is walking away from a $143 billion bid to buy Unilever after Unilever indicated that it was hella not cool with that. [Reuters]
If you see a significant digit in the wild, send it to @WaltHickey.