Welcome to the latest edition of Bacon Bytes. Summer is here, which means it is fashionably acceptable to be sans pantalones. This week we discover why you can’t trust movie reviews and a reminder that Bitcoin is a scam.
0
That’s the number of SAT scores the class of 2023 will need to submit as part of their application to the University of Chicago. Oh, it’s also the amount of money that they will need to pay, as the school has expanded it’s financial aid package to pay tuiiton as well as room and board for families earning less than $60k a year. This is huge news for higher education. It’s also a chance for me to remind you that Harvard has a $32 billion dollar endowment and currently costs about $250k for 4 years. And while Harvard does have similar programs in place for students that meet income requirements, the Harvard endowment is so frakkin large they could float their entire student body 4 years of free tuition, room, and board and they would be left with $30.5 billion dollars.
50
The percent of Americans that don’t know what the term “op-ed” means in journalism. There is a large disconnect between journalists and the public as highlighted in this survey. Maybe we could get rid of dozens of opinion columns posing as news programming and help clear up the confusion. But of course, it’s strong opinions that help drive ratings and, in turn, revenue for the networks as well as the talking heads.
64
That’s the percentage of critics at Rotten Tomatoes that are white males, revealing a bias in the ratings as a whole. Turns out that movie critics are overwhelmingly white and male. I’m now wondering if we could get similar demographics for Amazon reviews, maybe even include “robots” as a category.
140
The amount in USD that it would take for you to create your own custom Lego brick mosaic of any photograph you want. While it may be too late for Father’s Day, you have plenty of time to get this done for Christmas shopping.
249
The costs for an Amazon Deep Lens, which shipped this week. I’m waiting for mine right now, a gift for attending AWS re:Invent last year. Not sure what I will build first, but likely a “Bacon, not bacon” app of some kind.
600
The number of homes that could fit on an average sized 150-acre 18-hole golf course. Golf is a declining sport, and the opportunity to convert dead courses into affordable housing is meeting resistance by neighbors who would rather see the land converted to a park instead.
42 billion
The amount of value lost by the Bitcoin market after it was revealed Coinrail was hacked. I don’t know how else to tell you this, but Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are scams. Don’t waste your money on them.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my weekly Bacon Bytes posts. I’m going to start putting these into a newsletter format. You can sign up for my newsletter here to receive “Data on the Rocks”, coming soon!
It should be pointed out that monies represented in a university endowment often have restrictions on how those monies can be used. Further, the majority, if not all of that endowment will be comprised of non-cash assets (securities). This often leads to some asking “Why ABC University sit on all that cash?” which isn’t really a legitimate question.