The Alternative Olympics Medal Table

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Aug 042012
 

This is being written during the games, so the table is at a certain point in time; I will update once the Olympics have finished … and make it more complete, but the point stands.

Whilst the Olympics is not really about statistics, those of us with that perversion do tend to want to see the numbers. And every time the Olympics comes around, I get slightly irritated by the medal tables that appear. The headline medal tables simply rank countries in order of the number of medals their athletes have won, which is a spectacularly dumb way of ranking countries – with most other metrics there is the option of looking at deaths per thousand people, etc.

At present the standard medal table is led by China and the US. Both are enormous countries, so of course they get a lot of medals. And indeed the people in the US are probably saying that the US is outperforming China by the simple fact that it has pretty much the same number of medals despite being ¼ of the size! And that is quite right – so why do we not have a table of countries ranked by the population per medal – i.e. if a country has 50 gold medals, and 5,000,000 people then there is one gold medal per 100,000 people. If we do a table for that, we get some very different results :-

Rank Country Gold medals Population Population per medal
1 Great Britain 10 62m 6.2m
2 USA 21 314m 15m
3 China 20 1339m 67m

These results are very different and there very well may be other surprises if the full medal table is calculated. There are those who might claim this is a simple trick to get the UK on the top of the medal table, but it is not as simple as that … indeed this alternative medal table may well be helpful to larger countries. After all it shows that despite their total medal haul, they are not doing nearly as well as they should do!

Where Are All The UK’s Medals?

 General  2 Responses »
Aug 012012
 

Anyone would think that there is some sort of drastic failure on the part of the UK’s athletes, given a certain amount of consternation at the current UK medal haul, and with odious examples such as the idiot who chastised Tom Daley for his “failure”.

Perhaps the current medal haul could be better (as of writing, 2 golds, 2 silvers, and 4 bronzes), but those athletes who have not managed a medal up until now (despite expectations) have not failed in the conventional sense of the word. And this is not the old mythical English “It’s not the winning but the taking part that counts” rubbish.

What is easy to overlook is that an athlete who comes fourth in an Olympic competition may have failed to win gold, but has also succeeded in their chosen sport far more than we could. Or to put it another way, fourth best in the world means that someone is on the fourth step of a staircase 6 billion steps high, so that athlete who failed to get gold, silver, or bronze is still so far out of sight of the rest of us that we can’t see him (or her).

It is also easy to overlook that the difference between step 4 and step 3 on that 6 billion step staircase is tiny; sufficiently small that it is easy for an athlete on a less than perfect day to slip down a step or two.

We should be congratulating the UK’s athletes whether they get a medal or not.

And if you are still obsessed with the numbers of medals, look into the total that Europe has obtained as a whole. As a hint, China would not be in the top position.

Flaunt The Flakes!

 General  No Responses »
Jul 302012
 

If you haunt psoriasis self-help sites – which is worth doing if you happen to have it – you will often come across the standard advice of avoiding wearing dark coloured clothing (such as here, here or here). This is obviously to avoid showing up the inevitable skin flakes, and is to some extent quite sensible. After all a flurry of skin flakes cascading down black clothing (as I almost always wear) is not exactly subtle, and will make people wonder if you have something nasty.

And given that most of the damage associated with psoriasis is associated with how we feel society may react to the news we have a loathsome skin condition, it is hardly surprising that people want to hide it.

But perhaps that is the wrong way – perhaps we should be letting the flakes show up, and if people react as if we ought to be wearing sack-cloth clothing, ringing a bell, and shouting “Unclean” as we walk around, then fuck ’em.

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