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Significant Digits For Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Welcome to Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.


1 superdelegate

Bernie Sanders, who trails Hillary Clinton in pledged delegates and superdelegates, is trying to woo Clinton’s superdelegates to switch sides. He faced a setback, though, when one of his superdelegates — Emmett Hansen II of the U.S. Virgin Islands — announced that he will now back Clinton. [Bloomberg]


3 pounds of cheese

There’s a surplus of cheese in the United States. High prices and a hot export market sent production soaring, but then a strengthening dollar put off foreign buyers and prices sank. At current cheese levels, Americans would need to increase their consumption this year by 3 pounds each to eat the surplus away. This is the best news I have ever heard in my entire life, and I plan to do my part. [The Wall Street Journal]


More than 8 metric tons of cocaine

That’s the amount of cocaine seized by Colombian authorities last weekend at a banana farm. That’s more than 17,500 pounds, or roughly the weight of … you know what, I’m not going to even compare it to some really heavy thing; all you have to know is that it is a crapload of cocaine. [CNN]


30 percent

According to a University of Michigan Medical School survey of high-achieving doctors, that’s the percentage of women who said they have been sexually harassed during their careers. [Newsweek]


62 years

That’s how long it’s been since the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, declared segregated schools unconstitutional. But just this week, a judge ordered the Cleveland school district in Mississippi to desegregate. A plaintiff in the case — now 57 years old — was in fourth grade when the case was brought in 1965. [NPR]


335-to-1

Based on a new report from the AFL-CIO federation of unions, the average CEO of a company on the S&P 500 made 335 times as much money as the average production and non-supervisory worker in 2015. That’s down from 373 times as much money as 2014. Hooray? [Reuters]


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Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight’s chief culture writer.

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