We all love random numbers, don’t we? Maybe not truly “random” (otherwise I would just have to type 197,328 and you’d start guffawing, perhaps because each consecutive number pair adds up to 10 or something), but numbers connected to “reality” in one way or another. I have had periods of thinking the Harper’s Index was just about the highest form of genius possible to American letters. That’s crazy, but… if you start looking for them, even in arts stories in respectable journals, you see a lot of words around islands of numbers. Because we all love to quantify, don’t we?

Here are some recent quantifications, most courtesy of ArtsJournal:

119.9 — Million dollars. Amount Russian Roman Abramovich paid for two paintings, by Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, at Sotheby’s. His girlfriend, heiress Dasha Zhukova, is opening a new gallery in Moscow, according to the Arts Newspaper, which also sussed out Abramovich as the buyer. Abramovich was worth $18.7 billion in 2007, according to Forbes — a fortune built from the privatization of various pieces of the Soviet economy, notably oil. He also owns the Chelsea football club in the English Premier League. This irritates just about all Brit football fans.

1 — Rank of Noam Chomsky in Prospect magazine’s list of top 100 public intellectuals as voted on by readers. Umberto Eco was 2. Good for Noam: No one has tilted at windmills quite like he has.

16 — Percent of U.S. science teachers who are creationists, per NewScientist. The same study revealed that the amount of time biology teachers (creationist or not) are devoting to evolution is often miniscule. We spend a lot on science and math education in this country, but so little of it is about anything that matters — evolution, the incompleteness theorem, relativity, uncertainty principle, my craving for cheesedogs, etc.

40,000 — Number of books, some dating to the 17th century, that may be lost in a fire in the architecture building at the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. Efforts are underway to preserve as many of the books as possible, which are in a low-rise building next to the building that caught fire. Some numbers are very difficult for Art Scatter to process.