Almost four years ago I had a silly idea, and used Graphviz to generate a Hasse diagram of the 2008 Olympic medal table, under the partial order with which any sensible ranking of medal counts (irrespective of the country producing them) must agree no matter what relative importance it assigns to gold, silver and bronze.

I had an email from the New York Times a few weeks ago, saying that they were planning to pick up my idea and do the same thing this year. All they wanted to know was how to credit me accurately, but I mentioned to several friends a sneaking suspicion – based on previous interactions with journalists interested in my maths-and-computers frivolities – that round about now I might find then coming back and asking for a little help with the coding.

Apparently I greatly underestimated them. I've just checked my web logs and found this page: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/08/07/sports/olympics/the-best-and-worst-countries-in-the-medal-count.html. Not only did they have no trouble at all repeating my analysis, but they've managed to automate it on a web page so conveniently that they're able to drop in new data sets effortlessly – and so they're able to put it up before the Olympics are over (and presumably, therefore, it keeps running track as more medals are won), and have it also show the Beijing results and have a button to adjust for population. And their version is prettier and has mouseovers. Nice work, NYT!