4 ms·

Show HN: The Sochi 2014 medal count ordered by population

10 points by gflandre 13y ago

nodata 13y ago
Great! Since http://www.medalspercapita.com/ http://www.medalspercapita.com/ is not updating any more I can use this site instead. Any plans to sort by other items (GDP, etc.)?
- gflandre 13y ago
  There would be so many more interesting alternative rankings to make out of this data. I'm thinking about it!
  - nodata 13y ago
    Great. You could rank by weird things too: amount of snowfall per year, average number of hours skiied per year, ...
timonv 13y ago
Well, that's just gay[1]. [1] Disclaimer: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Gay http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Gay
bradleyland 13y ago
Why is this labeled "ordered by population"? It's not, because if it were, China would be at the top. Wouldn't "medals per capita" be more accurate?
VLM 13y ago
You might find it interesting to read about small numbers and statistical comparisons, and how they don't work very well together. This is different topic than the strong law of small numbers, or survivorship bias aka the backbone of our financial system. This brings up an interesting meta discussion of medal inflation. A simple wikipedia lookup and division shows 15K medals / 50 games is about 300 medals per game, but inflation has happened over the years so I think we'll have well over 300 medals this season. This waters down the marketing message. There are 300 recent medal winning olympians, lets say they have a decade of marketing relevance, thats five sets of games, or 1500 medal winners. The entire NFL only has 1500 or so players, in comparison. I believe this waters down the usefulness of the olympics. If all the olympics had was the decathlon, that would mean something more than it currently means. This is aside from the meta issue that's its basically a marketing and advertising trade show where as a side event some athletes perform. So the primary, important numbers are the dollar value of advertisements sold, sponsorships purchased, not some athletic achievement which was just a screensaver for the financial spreadsheet.
babesh 13y ago
It's wrong even then. Look at Italy and US. Italy should be ranked higher than the US on this basis.
cafard 13y ago
Perhaps it would be more useful to have not the national total, but the population living within regions that have snow on the ground at least n days in the average year.

10 points by gflandre 13y ago

Great! Since http://www.medalspercapita.com/ http://www.medalspercapita.com/ is not updating any more I can use this site instead. Any plans to sort by other items (GDP, etc.)?

gflandre 13y ago
There would be so many more interesting alternative rankings to make out of this data. I'm thinking about it!
- nodata 13y ago
  Great. You could rank by weird things too: amount of snowfall per year, average number of hours skiied per year, ...

timonv 13y ago

Well, that's just gay[1]. [1] Disclaimer: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Gay http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Gay

bradleyland 13y ago

Why is this labeled "ordered by population"? It's not, because if it were, China would be at the top. Wouldn't "medals per capita" be more accurate?

VLM 13y ago

You might find it interesting to read about small numbers and statistical comparisons, and how they don't work very well together. This is different topic than the strong law of small numbers, or survivorship bias aka the backbone of our financial system. This brings up an interesting meta discussion of medal inflation. A simple wikipedia lookup and division shows 15K medals / 50 games is about 300 medals per game, but inflation has happened over the years so I think we'll have well over 300 medals this season. This waters down the marketing message. There are 300 recent medal winning olympians, lets say they have a decade of marketing relevance, thats five sets of games, or 1500 medal winners. The entire NFL only has 1500 or so players, in comparison. I believe this waters down the usefulness of the olympics. If all the olympics had was the decathlon, that would mean something more than it currently means. This is aside from the meta issue that's its basically a marketing and advertising trade show where as a side event some athletes perform. So the primary, important numbers are the dollar value of advertisements sold, sponsorships purchased, not some athletic achievement which was just a screensaver for the financial spreadsheet.

babesh 13y ago

It's wrong even then. Look at Italy and US. Italy should be ranked higher than the US on this basis.

cafard 13y ago

Perhaps it would be more useful to have not the national total, but the population living within regions that have snow on the ground at least n days in the average year.