You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
-1.1 percent
For the first time in more than a decade, the Bakken oil fields of South Dakota produced less crude oil in September than they did in the same month the year before. My colleague Ben Casselman wrote last year about signs that North Dakota’s oil boom is unsustainable. [Bloomberg]
14 candidates
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal suspended his presidential campaign Tuesday, bringing the number of candidates vying for the GOP nomination down to an eminently reasonable and fundamentally manageable 14. [FiveThirtyEight]
15.71 seconds
Kenichi Ito of Tokyo has locked up the world record for a 100-meter dash sprinted on all fours. He’s a veritable Usain Bolt of poor understanding of well-regarded running form. [The Telegraph]
25 bombers
Russia showed up big time to the aerial bombardment campaign against the Islamic State yesterday, following the determination that a Russian passenger flight was brought down in a terror attack. Russia said it hit 14 ISIL targets with 34 cruise missiles and sent 25 bombers — a substantial chunk of its bomber wing — to join the opposition. [The Daily Beast]
46 percent
A new survey from Gallup found that 46 percent of girls in the seventh through 12th grades were “very confident” they could learn computer science, compared to 62 percent of boys. [Fusion]
52.9 percent
Percentage of college students who enrolled in the fall semester of 2009 who earned an associate or bachelor’s degree within the next six years. For-profit colleges in particular had dismal graduation rates. [FiveThirtyEight]
2 million
Every day I go through the Lincoln Tunnel, four lanes known for unfathomable gridlock, but the only traffic that still intimidates me is the traffic in Los Angeles. So it’s not a huge surprise that the city is the largest U.S. market for Waze, an app that offers drivers alternate routes in real time, with 2 million users in the area alone. The issue is that the alternate routes Waze suggests are often residential streets, and LA residents kind of hate the app for sending traffic to their humble detours. [The Wall Street Journal]
$50 million
More from the Russia Really Doesn’t Mess Around file: The government is offering a $50 million reward to anyone who helps find those responsible for planting a bomb onboard the destroyed plane. [Reuters]
$1 billion
Lyft, the “is Pepsi OK?” of on-demand car service apps, predicts it will hit $1 billion in gross annual revenue based on its October performance. [Reuters]
$4.5 billion
The American Medical Association, which represents 250,000 doctors, came out against direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription drugs, a $4.5 billion-per-year industry in the United States. Banning such advertising will presumably set back this nation’s stand-up and sketch comedians a generation, not to mention the advertising executives who for years have had to find a tasteful way to talk about older men getting erections on family-friendly primetime television. [AdWeek]
If you haven’t already, you really need to sign up for the Significant Digits newsletter — be the first to learn about the numbers behind the news.