Harper’s Index

Number of Americans federally registered as presidential candidates this year: 239¹

Number of G.O.P. presidential conventions since 1911 with a larger percentage of black delegates than last summer's: 5²

Percentage of G.O.P. delegates at the 1912 and 2000 conventions, respectively, who identified themselves as black: 6, 4.1³

Percentage of House votes cast by Dick Cheney and Al Gore on abortion between 1979 and 1984 that were the same: 93⁴

Number of House abortion bills voted on since 1994 for every campaign-finance bill voted on: 9⁵

Number of years that a Philip Morris consultant was also working as George W. Bush's gubernatorial campaign manager: 2⁶

Damages that 5 tobacco companies were ordered to pay plaintiffs last July in a Florida class-action suit: $144,800,000,000⁷

Months before this that Florida reduced its appeal bond fee from 100 percent of damages to a maximum of $100 million: 2⁸

Number of Colt revolvers that a Texas judge repaired during jury selection in a capital-murder trial last fall: 2⁹

Estimated tons of lead contained in the estimated 315 million computers that will be obsolete by 2004: 600,000¹⁰

Tons of SF5CF3, a synthetic greenhouse gas, discovered this year to have accumulated in the atmosphere since 1950: 4,000¹¹

Ratio of destructiveness to the ozone layer of a molecule of carbon dioxide to that of a molecule of SF5CF3: 1:18,000¹²

Percentage by which 11 million unexplained lobster deaths reduced Long Island Sound's lobster harvest last fall: 90¹³

Number of U.S. sheep and elk that have tested positive for a variant of mad cow disease in the last year: 60¹⁴

Percentage change since last year in the number of deaths in Britain due to the human form of mad cow disease: +175¹⁵

Factor by which pregnancy makes a woman more attractive to malaria-carrying mosquitoes: 2¹⁶

Price in Kenya of 100 units of nevirapine, a drug that prevents mother-to-child HIV transmission: $874¹⁷

Price in Norway: $430¹⁸

Factor by which cocaine production in Colombia has increased since 1995: 2¹⁹

Factor by which annual U.S. military aid to Colombia has increased since then: 31²⁰

Estimated voter registration rate among Kosovo Albanians last August: 83²¹

Estimated voter registration rate among Kosovo Serbs, whose leaders are calling for a boycott of this fall's elections there: 2²²

Damages for war crimes that a U.S. court has ordered Serb leader Radovan Karadzic to pay 14 Bosnian plaintiffs: $745,000,000²³

Amount a Chicago suburb's city council offered a Muslim group last June to abandon its plans for a mosque there: $200,000²⁴

Days after the group accepted the offer that the mayor vetoed the deal as “insulting”: 4²⁵

Average number of people living per square mile in the Gaza Strip, New Jersey, and Japan, respectively: 8,000, 1,100, 828²⁶

Average number of corpses per acre at the University of Tennessee's “body farm,” for the study of decomposition: 10²⁷

Rank of Ravalli among Montana counties with the largest growth rate in both population and fire damage since 1992: 1²⁸

Estimated number of fake haunted houses operating commercially in the United States last October: 3,000²⁹

Number of U.S. houses that are really haunted, according to the Ghost Research Society: 789³⁰

Percentage change since 1978 in the number of Americans who say they believe in ghosts: +200³¹

Tons by which the Earth's weight was discovered this year to have been overestimated: 8.8 X 1018³²

Average number of miles by which the Concorde flies closer to the sun than other passenger planes: 4.7³³

Percentage change since 1986 in the annual number of U.S. patents awarded for a gene or gene fragment: +6,519³⁴

Year in which scientists confirmed that subjecting newborn rats to pain may have long-term neurological effects: 2000³⁵

Minimum number of months required for a lame duck to fully recover: 3³⁶

Column inches that the New York Times devoted last August 13 to Joe Lieberman's resemblance to actor Sam Jaffe: 9³⁷

Minimum number of times that Senator John McCain winked while endorsing George W. Bush at last summer's convention: 5³⁸

Number of novels by a current vice presidential candidate's wife wherein a vice president dies in flagrante delicto: 1³⁹

Response: January 2001, page 6

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