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

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:

Marvel vs. DC

Comparison from a movie perspective, with scores based on Rotten Tomatoes' aggregate reviews.

DC:

Year	Movie	Score
1978	Superman	94
1981	Superman II	88
1983	Superman III	24
1987	Superman IV	10
1989	Batman	71
1992	Batman Returns	79
1995	Batman Forever	44
1997	Batman & Robin	13
2004	Catwoman	10
2005	Batman Begins	85
2006	Superman Returns	76
2008	The Dark Knight	94
2009	Watchmen	64
2010	Jonah Hex	12
2011	Green Lantern	27
	Average	52.73
	Median	64
	Standard deviation	33.63

Marvel:

Year	Movie	Score
2000	X-Men	82
2002	Spider-Man	89
2003	Daredevil	45
2003	X-Men 2	88
2003	Hulk	62
2004	The Punisher	29
2004	Spider-Man 2	93
2005	Elektra	10
2005	Fantastic Four	27
2006	X-Men: The Last Stand	57
2007	Ghost Rider	26
2007	Spider-Man 3	63
2007	Fantastic Four 2	37
2008	Iron Man	94
2008	The Incredible Hulk	66
2008	Punisher: War Zone	26
2009	X-Men Origins: Wolverine	37
2010	Iron Man 2	74
2011	Thor	77
2011	X-Men: First Class	87
2011	Captain America	79
	Average	59.43
	Median	63
	Standard deviation	26.58
	Independent average	78
	Independent median	77
	Independent std dev	10.22

Titles in red were independently produced by Marvel studios.

On average, Marvel's films tend to be a little better than DC's.

Lowest of the low: Superman IV, Catwoman, Elektra (10%)
Best of the best: Superman, The Dark Knight, Iron Man (94%)