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Prime Numbers
Movies, MPs and Angry Birds: the week in statistics
Plus: How long it takes to ruin a two-hour debate, and the number of people who’d rather pick a convict than Obama.
EVERY WEEK, TheJournal.ie offers you a selection of statistics and numerical nuggets to help you digest the week that has just passed.
21 – The number of seats in the new Greek parliament won by the Golden Dawn party, a group often accused of being a Neo-Nazi outfit and whose logo – albeit drawn from an ancient Greek character – bears resemblance to the Swastika. It’s the first time that the party has been represented in the 300-member parliament.
74 per cent – What was previously the largest party had a torrid election – dropping from first to third, and losing three quarters of its seats along the way – was punished by voters for presiding over the transition into an EU-IMF bailout. No, it’s not Fianna Fáil: it’s PASOK, who went from 160 seats in the 2008 election to just 41 this time around. (Fianna Fáil went from 77 to 20 in the last two elections.)
149 – The number of seats that PASOK and the other main pro-bailout party, New Democracy, won in the election. Out of 300, that leaves them 2 MPs short of an overall majority – while every single other party is opposed to the EU-IMF bailout in some way. (The anti-bailout parties can’t form a government because they come from wildly varying parts of the political spectrum.)
0 – The distance that a missing tortoise managed to get away from his family home in Rathgar last weekend before being found. 100-year-0ld Florentine went missing from the back garden of the family home last Sunday – but was found on Monday, cover in mud, having apparently tried to bury himself in the garden.
€81.3 million – The amount made by game developer Rovio last year through sales of, and merchandise relating to, the Angry Birds game in 2011. That’s a game that cost around €100,000 to develop.
€1.55 billion – The amount that a single trader in London is believed to have lost while working for JP Morgan in a few weeks earlier this year. The $2 billion loss is an unusual blow to the USA’s largest bank.
€160 million – The new world record for a film’s box office takings in its opening weekend. That goes to The Avengers, which opened in the US last Friday. Its takings (almost $208 million) beat the previous record, $169.2 million, for the final Harry Potter movie last year.
20 seconds – The approximate time for which Julia Orayen appeared on screen during a debate between Mexico’s presidential candidates last Sunday. Her appearance – in which the model-turned-production-assistant wore a revealing white dress – somehow overshadowed the rest of the two-hour debate.
0 – Number of times Muammar Gaddafi visited Charles Haughey’s Abbeville home, according to his family. It had been reported on Thursday that the house had played host to Gaddafi as well as the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Luciano Pavarotti.
9 days – The apparent age of a child which was reported to have fallen into Belfast Lough after falling off a boat, along with its mother, earlier this week. The search was called off when police became convinced no such child existed.
41 per cent – The proportion of Democratic voters in the state of West Virginia who opted to pick a serving prisoner, Keith Judd, over Barack Obama as the party nominee for President.
€44.63 - The price of a club sandwich in a five-star hotel in Paris – making the city the most expensive in the newly-revealed Club Sandwich Index. By comparison, it’ll set you back just under €12 in Dublin, which came in 20th out of the 26 cities surveyed.
0 – Numbers of nights’ sleep Jean Byrne will have lost after seeing Prince Charles’ not-that-bad-actually attempt at doing a weather forecast.
