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Significant Digits For Friday, Aug. 28, 2015

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.

1 voter

Gerrymandering can backfire, moneyed elites: A redistricting plan accidentally left a single University of Missouri student as the sole registered voter in a community improvement district in Columbia, Missouri. By herself, Jen Henderson, age 23, gets to vote on a sales tax increase for her area. [Columbia Daily Tribune]

2.45 percent

What a week! The Nasdaq Composite gained 2.45 percent Thursday, rebounding from a tumultuous couple of days when the market appeared to be in a correction. Aren’t you glad you listened to Ben Casselman? [CNBC]


20 percent

Percentage of Americans who talk about their religion online in a typical week. [Pew Research Center]


41 percent

According to a survey of 20,000 U.S. service-members, 41 percent of women in the military have suffered sexual harassment. About 4 percent of men surveyed also reported they had been sexually harassed. [Reuters]


71 percent

A Billboard survey of music executives found that 71 percent of respondents thought the music streaming service Tidal would survive for one more year or less. This isn’t very encouraging for the Jay-Z helmed app. Then again, if there’s a group on the planet to trust less about technology than music industry executives, I’d love to meet them and introduce them to fire, rounded stones and pointed sticks. [Billboard]


103 points

Consumer Reports is typically a no-nonsense evaluator of products. But that fact made the magazine’s initial score for the Tesla Model S P85D, 103 out of a possible 100, raise some eyebrows. The test is broken! Consumer Reports eventually had to tweak their model, but does this mean the blender I bought that I thought scored a 65 actually did worse? [Forbes]


152 socks

Current record for number of socks worn on one foot. That seems like a dubious mark to enshrine. Nonetheless, Guinness wants to record it, and more importantly, someone was possessed to attempt such a record. What drives someone to break a dumb record? The motivations are all across the board. [The Atlantic]


63 million people

Following protests, mobile Internet in the Gujarat state in India — home to 63 million — has been disabled and blocked. [The Next Web]


1 billion visitors

Facebook hit a milestone on Monday, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced, with 1 billion people visiting the service in a single day. While Facebook has about 1.5 billion active monthly users, this is the first time the site has had 1 billion unique people visit in a day. [Slate]


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Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight’s chief culture writer.

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