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:

Against Breakfast Grains

I have so many tabs open right now.

Thank God for the Brights. Every time I find myself at the top of the cliff of doubt, staring down into the dark and murky abyss, contemplating how much fun it might be to jump off and fly through the air, and listening intently to the voice that incessantly whispers into my ear, "go ahead; it won't hurt," all I need to do is read from a Bright. It is as if a bony and gnarled claw reaches up from the abyss in an attempt to grab me... but flails so wildly and inaccurately that it ends up knocking me back several feet from the abyss, and the force of landing so hard on my ass knocks me from my stupor and cleanses the voice from my ears. Their complete and utter misunderstanding of all things religious never elicits anything more than an eyeroll from me, and always serves to remind me of why it is I actually believe.

The strawmen erected in their arguments are always so laughably inept attempts to characterize the Church. It is as if I am kneeling at the glorious altar, adorned in gold and precious gems, sitting atop of which is the King of Glory to whom every knee must bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, when a Bright comes up behind me and taps me upon the shoulder. "What a stupid and ugly god you worship," he says. I look up at him, incredulously. He points and says, "why it's nothing more than a heap of feces and straw." I look at where he is pointing and notice that he has his back to the throne, and is looking off into the distance behind me, at what is indeed an ugly and stupid altar that he's erected from nothing more than fecal matter and straw. The Bright crosses his arms, a smug look of self-satisfaction on his face. Of course, it's impossible to get him to actually turn around. "No thanks, I can see your idiotic god just fine from here," he'll say confidently. The only thing you can really say in response is "yes, it is idiotic. Don't back away from it so fast you trip on my kneeler and land on your ass." (Which has happened at least a few times.)

The indispensable Archbishop Fulton Sheen summed it up so perfectly: "There are not more than 100 people in the world who truly hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they perceive to be the Catholic Church. Which is, of course, quite a different thing."

Fr. Robert Barron, in one of his Catholicism series documentaries, commented that he actually agrees with a lot of atheists. They'll complain about how stupid it is to worship a "magical sky-fairy", to which Fr. Barron says "yeah, I agree." Or they complain about the sky-bully who arbitrarily condemns people to hell fire for breaking nonsensical rules. "I agree," says Fr. Barron. It seems to me that the majority of the arguments against Catholicism, against the Church, and against God that I hear (at least on the Internet, which isn't exactly known for intellectual thoroughness) are little more than strawmen.

All this is a very roundabout way of bringing me to a recently-posted "The Oatmeal" comic. Now, I'm a bit of a fan of The Oatmeal, so whereas I'd normally just ignore this type of slight, I though, in the interest of fanboyishness, to respond. It also helps that his comic is a collection of all the "best" arguments against religion (so I can rebut them all in one place), and actually is still kinda funny.

Blog Update

Considering a new look for this blog.

Click here to check it out and tell me what you think.

The Official Rankings

Updated for 2012

1. Anthropomorphic Superheroes
2. Anthropomorphic Old Guy, Boyscout, and Dog
3. Anthropomorphic Monsters
4. Anthropomorphic Robots
5. Anthropomorphic Rats
6. Anthropomorphic Scotsmen
7. Anthropomorphic Cars
8. Anthropomorphic Toys (third time)
9. Anthropomorphic Fish
10. Anthropomorphic Bugs
11. Anthropomorphic Toys (again)
12. Anthropomorphic Toys
13. Anthropomorphic Cars (again)

Random facts (courtesy Wikipedia).

• The lowest-grossing (worldwide) Pixar film was their first, Toy Story, at $361 million. It was made on a budget of $30 million. The highest-grossing is Toy Story 3, at over $1 billion
• Cars 2 is the only Pixar film not to have been nominated for any Academy awards.
• Six of their thirteen feature-length films have won Best Animated Feature. Two more were nominated but did not win.
• Here's a picture of me with the co-director of Brave, taken at San Diego Comic-con 2007:

Note stylish hat. Another reason to wear one.

Schola Concert

Well for those of you not privileged enough to live in shouting distance of my wonderful voice, I recorded our concert and uploaded it to YouTube. Here it is for your viewing pleasure.



So far, no one has said I sounded terrible, so that's a plus.

Also, audio quality is terrible. Any suggestions for a cheap, good audio solution for a large, empty space?

Well, Yeah

Wherein a Slate writer laments that if women start treating their unborn like children, then y'know, we might (*gasp*) start treating them like humans in other ways.

Key quote:

[I]t got us thinking about how the more we treat fetuses like people—including them in our family photo shoots, tagging them on our Facebook walls, giving them their own Twitter accounts—the harder it will be to deny that they are people when the next, say, personhood amendment comes up, with legislators and activists arguing that “the unborn child” inside a pregnant woman’s womb should have the same rights as the living among us.

Laundry

With no apologies to XKCD.