You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
1 finisher
The Barkley Marathon is an obscene ultramarathon that only 15 people have ever actually finished. There’s a delightful documentary — “The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young” — that covers one year of it for those interested in watching people in agony. It has to be completed in 60 hours or less, and this year only one runner pulled off the feat. [Running]
21 advertisers
Yesterday we reported that Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz had pulled advertising from “The O’Reilly Factor” because of a report that Fox News had paid out $13 million to several women over alleged sexual harassment and verbal abuse by Bill O’Reilly. Nineteen more advertisers have now followed suit and pulled their ads from the show. [CNN]
55 percent
The Affordable Care Act is more popular than it has ever been among Americans, according to Gallup’s ongoing poll. 55 percent of the country approves of President Obama’s signature health care reform act, up from 42 percent before the election. [Gallup]
57.5 feet
A massive 57.5-foot-wide tunneling machine, the largest in the world, has emerged from its multi-year subterranean journey beneath Seattle. The machine’s name is Bertha, and after being broken for two years it has finally emerged victorious from underground. [NPR]
58 percent
Bring a windbreaker if you’re headed to Scotland anytime soon. Wind energy provided 1.2 million megawatt hours of electricity last month, more than enough to power all 3.3 million Scottish households and accounting for 58 percent of the country’s electrical needs. [The Independent]
$8.6 million
A California court ordered that Bossland, a German company specializing in selling multiplayer video game cheats, had to pay game developer Blizzard $8.6 million for copyright infringement because it sold hacks to players of the Blizzard’s “Overwatch” game. The hacks allowed cheaters to see the locations of other players, which I guess had the one advantage of making Widowmaker mains even more irrelevant in the game’s meta, so boo hoo to that I guess. [BBC]
If you see a significant digit in the wild, send it to @WaltHickey.