You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news. The rest of this week we’ll have a different guest FiveThirtyEight-er posting each day. Today it’s Jody Avirgan, host of the politics podcast and your first guide to a post-Walt world.
8 miles
That’s the distance between where the region of Wangata appears on World Health Organization maps, and where it actually lies, in the center of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s city Mbandaka. Those mapping errors make a big difference when it comes to tracking the latest Ebola outbreak. “It’s really important for the outbreak response to have real and accurate data,” says a cartographer working with the Ministry of Health. Here’s hoping the maps become more accurate, and the outbreak less severe. [The Atlantic]
26 postures
Bikram Yoga is a form of yoga done in a super-hot room, with 26 postures performed over the course of 90 minutes. From the late 1970s to the early 2000s, Bikram was at the heart of a yoga revolution in the U.S., with hundreds of thousands of practitioners around the country. At the center of it all was founder Bikram Choudhary. But his rise to power masked a very dark side, and in recent years Choudhary has been accused of multiple sexual assaults and rapes. Today, 30 for 30 Podcasts, which I host and produce, launches a five-part series on Bikram, his actions, and the community that is dealing with the fallout. I’m really proud of our work, led by Julia Lowrie Henderson, which took almost a year and a half of reporting. I hope you’ll listen. [30 for 30 Podcasts]
29 years
Perhaps the ur-example of Hollywood development hell finally has its ending. Terry Gilliam premiered “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” at Cannes this past weekend. It’s a film he started working on in 1989. “It’s taken all those years of marinating in my life to get there,” Gilliam said. That’s a lot of marinating, but it seems worth it — early reports are that it’s pretty good. Also, if you haven’t seen the documentary “Lost In La Mancha,” which was intended to be a “making of” but ended up being a chronicle of disaster, check it out. [Reuters]
32 percent
In a survey from earlier this year, 32 percent of Americans under 30 said they practiced what to do in the event of an mass shooting at their school. Not a single respondent to the survey over the age of 65 says they did so. [Huffington Post]
125 million
Netflix has 125 million subscribers worldwide. That’s 250 million (give or take) eyeballs available for the new ~content~ that Michelle and Barack Obama will be providing on the streaming conglomerate. They announced a “storytelling partnership” yesterday that is big on hype and low on specifics, including the amount the Obamas are being paid — which is probably about $6 kagillion, which should have been the significant digit come to think of it. [Netflix]
$650 million
The NHL is asking $650 million of an ownership group from Seattle to expand to that city and add a 32nd franchise to the league. Why is that significant? It’s $150 million more than what the league asked less than two years ago of an ownership group in Las Vegas. Why is that significant? Well, the Vegas Golden Knights just made the Stanley Cup finals in their first year of existence, a remarkable feat for a team that is, by definition, comprised of cast-offs from other squads. Honestly, it’s one of the coolest stories in sports, and apparently it’s a cash cow for the league. [ESPN]
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