You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
92 chemicals
Florida’s Environmental Regulatory Commission is considering increasing the number of chemicals allowed in drinking water from 54 to 92, and is also considering a move that will allow the maximum concentration of other chemicals — many of them carcinogens — above their current allowable thresholds. [The Miami Herald]
$647
Annual spending by an average recreational marijuana user in Washington on legal pot, according to a cannabis market research group. [Bloomberg]
$1,500
A Florida judge has ruled that bitcoin is not legally considered money. The ruling came as part of a case involving an alleged laundering of $1,500 worth of the virtual blockchain currency. [The Miami Herald]
2,838
With the support of 2,838 delegates to Sanders’s 1,843, last night Hillary Clinton was officially nominated to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president. She is the first woman to be the nominee of a major American political party. [ABC News, FiveThirtyEight]
Relevant weeklong sidebar: It’s the Democratic National Convention! FiveThirtyEight has sent its crack political team — and also for some inexplicable reason me — to Philly, known to Giants fans like me as a seething hellmouth, to cover the events. FiveThirtyEight has its own show on ABC News Digital at 5 p.m. ET each evening of the convention, so tune in to that! I’ll be on the stream later on in the evening, so watch that too.
$2 million
Michael Jordan, normally rather mute on politics, announced he has donated a total of $2 million to the Institute for Community-Police Relations and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. [The Undefeated]
$1.4 billion
Amount of money the United States spent on abstinence education in Africa from 2004 to 2013. New evidence indicates it did not have an effect on the age of someone’s first sexual experience, the teenage pregnancy rate, or a person’s number of sexual partners. [NPR]
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