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Significant Digits For Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2015

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news. To receive this newsletter in your inbox, subscribe.

7-9 hours

The National Sleep Foundation is out with new recommendations for the amount of sleep people should get at different ages. For 18- to 25-year-olds, a new age category, the foundation’s scientific advisory council suggests getting seven to nine hours each night. [The Huffington Post]

10 percent drop

The Obama administration has pushed back the date by which it aims to end chronic homelessness by one year, to 2017. The number of chronically homeless people has dropped 10 percent since 2010. [Associated Press]


16 percent

Following a well-received speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker gained standing among Iowa Republicans, taking 16 percent in a poll of potential Iowa caucus voters. Still, as my colleague Harry Enten explains, chaos is the true champion in the poll. [FiveThirtyEight]

34 percent

Advertisements made up a little more than one-third of the Super Bowl broadcast. The automobile industry alone is estimated to have spent a cumulative $121.5 million shilling cars and their ilk during the NBC telecast. [Bloomberg Business]


$80

Buffalo Bills head coach Rex Ryan knows how to commit to a new gig. Last Friday, the ex-Jets coach got his tattoo of his wife in a Mark Sanchez Jets jersey color-corrected to a tattoo of his wife in a Bills jersey. The incoming coach was charged $80 by a Scottsdale, Arizona, tattoo shop, which is a total bargain, because I paid at least $120 to a guy on St. Mark’s Place to tattoo the damn FiveThirtyEight fox on my neck. [The Wall Street Journal]

676 percent increase

Missy Elliott’s killer performance during the Super Bowl halftime show has boosted popularity of the artist’s songs on digital-download and streaming services. Spotify streams of Elliott’s music — most of which came out in the late 1990s and early 2000s — rose 676 percent after her performance. [The Washington Post]

2,400 members

Iceland will get its first new major temple dedicated to Norse gods since the Viking era as Norse paganism makes a comeback. Membership in an organization that promotes faith in the old gods has tripled to 2,400 — less than 1 percent of the Icelandic population — in the past decade. [Reuters]


$50 million

RadioShack, a vestigial organ of the American economy, is being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. To remain listed, a company must clear a $50 million threshold with either its 30-trading-day-average global market capitalization or its stockholders’ equity. The Shack has a market cap of $24.19 million and negative shareholders’ equity. Good night, sweet prince. [NYSE via The Wall Street Journal]


114.4 million viewers

Sunday’s Super Bowl was watched by 114.4 million people in the U.S., breaking the record for largest TV audience set by last year’s Super Bowl. [The Hollywood Reporter]


$506 billion

President Obama has announced a plan to tax earnings held offshore by companies such as GE and Microsoft. His proposals — a one-time tax on earnings held abroad, then tax-code changes on future offshore profits — would raise an estimated $506 billion over the next 10 years. [Bloomberg]

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Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight’s chief culture writer.

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