Significant Digits For Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Mar. 23, 2016 , at 7:46 AM
By Walt Hickey
You're reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
Good news: I'm going on vacation starting tomorrow. Better news: Significant Digits will be run by my colleague Neil Paine on Thursday and Friday and will be all about March Madness!
The Tampa Bay Rays defeated the Cuban national team 4-1 in front of President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro, who did the wave. Obama and Castro did the wave! [ESPN]
Web traffic drop for Vice Media between January and February, which says less about the health of its core product — Vice.com's traffic was up — and more about the crazy ways websites boost their numbers for advertisers. Basically, smaller websites sign away their audience numbers to larger sites like Vice in exchange for better ad rates. These small sites get better ad inventory, and the larger sites can claim a higher audience. But in February, Distractify, one of the sites that helped Vice pad its numbers, essentially imploded. Live by the click, die by the click. [Variety]
Actor Jeremy Renner has been on a house-flipping spree in the greater Hollywood area, buying at least 20 houses in the past 15 years, renovating them and selling them for a profit. As far as hobbies go, it's nowhere near "being Hawkeye," but it's neat. [Bloomberg]
58 delegates
Donald Trump had a decent night on Tuesday, winning all of Arizona's 58 delegates. Utah, however, went hard for Cruz, and American Samoa will send its delegates to the Republican convention uncommitted. [FiveThirtyEight]
Approximate number of tweets from @VENETHIS on Twitter, or 15,000 per day since the user joined the service in 2009. That's by far the highest number of tweets for any single account by a long shot. [FiveThirtyEight]
50 trillion stars
When you go fishing for supernovae, you have to cast a pretty wide net: Scientists were able to catch two stars — KSN 2011a and KSN 2011d — exploding, but did so by monitoring light every 30 minutes for three years from a field of 500 galaxies comprised of 50 trillion stars. Nailed it! [The Washington Post]
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Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight's chief culture writer. @WaltHickey