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$22
Amount of cash carried by the median American consumer, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. The study also found that 5.2 percent of consumers carried one or more $100 bills, but it failed to determine why they were always holding up the line in front of me at Starbucks. [Bloomberg Businessweek]
40 percent
Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” of Americans who owe no federal income tax are now down to 40 percent. [Washington Post]
42 percent
Joseph Morrissey, a member of the Virginia Assembly, was re-elected to the House of Delegates with 42 percent of the vote. Morrissey, who first served as a Democrat, resigned from office after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge relating to his relationship with a 17-year-old receptionist, but promised to run as an independent in the special election. We’re two weeks into 2015 and Virginia politics is already having a rough year. [Washington Post]
45 percent
62 percent completion rate
New data available from e-book readers allows publishers to determine how many people finish the books they start as well as when they put books down. Britons were most likely to finish a romance novel, with a 62 percent completion rate. [New York Review of Books]
73 percent of the Republican caucus
89 fires
Ohio State University fans tore down a goalpost and set 89 fires, mostly trash fires, after their team’s 42-20 win Monday in the College Football Playoff National Championship. Police responded with tear gas when fans tried to break their way into the stadium. [Baltimore Sun]
500,000 offspring
$2.3 million
Sale price of a penny at a Florida auction. The penny was pretty old, and rather rare, so I suppose the decision made sense at the time. Still, even if you had a penny that was scientifically proven to make the owner more lucky, $2.3 million still feels like a really big ask, you know? [Smithsonian Magazine]
16 million 3-by-5 cards
The size of the most comprehensive repository of American English, maintained at Merriam-Webster’s headquarters in Springfield, Massachusetts. The records — which are made out of archaic, fibrous data storage system known as “paper” — are said to be fireproof, like a cloud-based backup would also be. [Slate]
As always, if you see a significant digit in the wild, tweet it to me @WaltHickey.
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