

Show HN: The Sochi 2014 medal count ordered by population - gflandre
http://gflandre.com/olympics

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bradleyland
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?

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nodata
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.)?

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gflandre
There would be so many more interesting alternative rankings to make out of
this data. I'm thinking about it!

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nodata
Great. You could rank by weird things too: amount of snowfall per year,
average number of hours skiied per year, ...

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cafard
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.

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

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timonv
Well, that's just gay[1].

[1] Disclaimer:
[http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Gay](http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Gay)

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VLM
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.

