Evaluating the Olympics

There are many different ways to interpret the medal count to determine which country "won" the Olympics. Throughout its coverage of the Olympics, my daily (US) newspaper ranked countries by total medals won. This put the US at the top; other countries' media seem to prefer a self-favoring ranking system, too. Measuring in golds per million people or golds per billion GDP, the US fared quite poorly.

Generally impressive all-around geek Simon Tatham constructed this Hasse diagram of countries participating in the 2008 Olympics. His idea was to take generally sensible comparisons (where country A clearly outperformed country B) and form a partial ordering of countries.

So we want to say that one country has done strictly better than another if the medal score of the latter can be transformed into the former by a sequence of medal additions and medal upgrades. A bit of thought shows that this is exactly equivalent to defining a partial order on triples of medals...

I found this very satisfying not only because I love graphs and beautiful diagrams, but because it also allows for easy visual comprehension of which countries performed around the same level.

(Via *God Plays Dice*.)


This post's theme word: fungible, "interchangeable," usually used in an economic sense w.r.t. products or assets.

Hamster? Bunny rabbit? Star-, circle-, heart-shaped eggs.

R1 and I have often conversed about the confusion of crossed romantic signals. So this evening, R2 invited me to dinner and cooked for me again. I'm fairly certain this was a non-romantic encounter, and that R2 is just a friendly guy. (He told a joke that -- even after translation -- made me blush. Awk.)

eggs cooked in molds
and
fried onions and sweet potatoes

Today was colder than I expected, and I had to wear my office sweatshirt home. The cold did nothing to assuage my aching knee, so now I sit at home doing PT exercises with an exercise band and an ice pack, staving off the cold with a sweatshirt.

And despite the cold, I had several positive social encounters today and so I feel warm and fuzzy inside. (Even though I've had the following clip looping in my head all day: "When I walk in the room, there's a table of men. Always men!" ... on a related note, I believe there's an incoming woman graduate student! That will make two of us. Huzzah!)


This post's theme word: catholicon, "a panacea."