What Have We Forgotten?

Because I'm on a stats kick, it seems.

Inspired by XKCD 1093: "When will we forget"

Percent of Americans who aren’t old enough to remember	Event
10%	Last year
11%	Trying to say “Eyjafjallajökull”
12%	Michael Jackson
14%	The Bush Presidency
15%	The first iPhone
16%	The planet Pluto
18%	Bl. John Paul the Great
19%	The Superbowl wardrobe malfunction
20%	A time before Facebook
22%	The Beltway Sniper

Wikipedia Fact of the Day

In mediaeval England a licence to crenellate (or licence to fortify) granted the holder permission to fortify their property. Such licences were granted by the king, and by the rulers of the counties palatine within their jurisdictions, i.e. by the Bishops of Durham, the Earls of Chester, and after 1351 by the Dukes of Lancaster.

Full article.

"License to Crenellate" is the name of my Mannheim Steamroller cover band*.

*For those not in the know, "X is the name of my Y cover band" has officially replaced Dave Barry's "[blank] would be an excellent name for a rock band" on the internet.

Jane Austen...

...is apparently a lot more interesting than I was led to believe.

And the Winner Is... (Addendum)

Someone stole my idea! And turned it into a cool infographic!

(But forgot to do an athlete comparison.)

On Chicken Sandwiches

Remember this cartoon from the George Tiller shooting?

(There were many just like it. A quick Google search turns up plenty in the same vein.)

And remember this from last week?



(This is just one example among many, but the entire Chick-Fil-A protest could be submitted as an example.)

So I wonder how many leftists will blame this morning's FRC shooting on the gay activists' "hate-filled rhetoric". Or condemn anti-bullying advocate Dan Savage for his hate-filled bullying.

At least some prominent activists have condemned the shooting.

* * *

I think what worries me most about the backlash against a restaurateur for holding the same position Barack Obama did six months ago is that I can't recall a time in my life where the devil has overplayed his hand.

This level of hate normally has a way of backfiring. To whit, it's hard to defend the side of civilization in the fray of the same sex "marriage" debate without eliciting comparisons to Westboro Baptist, or being told you hate gays. I think it's because, due to WBC's hate, the pro-sanity movement (of which WBC is assuredly not a part) has been smeared. The only argument gay activists know against gay marriage is the "God hates gays" one. Therefore, if you stand for honor and decency, you must hate gays. WBC has become the new Godwin's Law.

(Aside, my pet conspiracy theory is that WBC is entirely funded by a gay rights organization.)

So, I would expect, what with the blatant display of hate and bigotry shown by many gay rights activists (including three politicians promising to ban Chick-Fil-As from their towns), that it would undermine their movement in much the same way as WBC does ours.

I would expect.

But that brings me to my previous point: I've never seen the devil overplay his hand so seriously and blatantly. Which leads me to believe he knows something I don't. I can't imagine that the invisible hand moving the chess pieces has given up board position over a fast food restaurant. As a being of pure intellect, he's very intelligent. I fear that he's merely sacrificed a pawn here but hasn't ceded any ground.

And the Winner Is...

...Grenada? Who'd have thought?

Let's assume human talent for any given skill follows a statistical distribution (like a bell curve). So any random sample of a significant number of people would follow that distribution. Let's further assume that human talent is equally distributed across the planet. If it really was completely equal, then the people from one nation would form a random sample, and the distribution of talent within that country should conform to that same distribution as the world population. With me so far?

So, the point of the Olympics, it seems, is to incite nationalism and unhealthy pride, and cause condescension towards people with different skin color, language, or social customs inspire warm fuzzy feelings among all members of the human race by demonstrating how people from our country are obviously so much better than you because we won more medals and that mean's we're a superior race and you should be bred out of existence the athletic talent, courage, determination, and perseverance of people from every nation.

This brings up the topic of who "won" the Olympics. Typically, this is figured by gold medal count (since no one cares about silver or bronze). This year, the US "won" the Olympics by bringing home the most gold medals (46), compared with second-place China (38). But is this really the best indicator of "winning"? If skill was distributed equally across the globe, then you would expect those nations with more people to have more athletes at the top of the bell curve, and therefore more gold medals. So really, there's nothing unexpected about the top two gold medal winners also being the third and first most populous countries. This would even happen if, on average, Americans and Chinese fell below the curve on athletic talent.

With this in mind, let's take a look at the gold medal winnings. The Olympics web site has a chart of all medaling nations and how many medals each one won, comparing that with Wikipedia's list of countries by population allows us to calculate how many medals were won per 100 million residents of each country. This way, we can figure out which countries really did earn more medals than would be expected for equal talent distribution.

Sorted this way, we find the real winners of the Olympics: