Ooh, I do like non-parametric solutions to problems. All those constants are so arbitrary. The New York Times!
It's always nice to see American journalists treat people properly. It reminds is that in Britain the Mail would probably have stolen it, got the maths wrong, say the law doesn't apply to them and then threatened any complainant with a smear campaign of dubious veracity. Continental journalists can be quite respectable too, but in a different way. American print journalists always get the details right but sometimes paint the wrong picture, continental print journalists are better at big pictures, but a bit smudgy. British print journalists (and, it seems, the CPS) seem mainly to be wearing dirty macs and sniffing around the bins for discarded polaroids.
Interestingly, in the IOC's charter it is explicitly prohibited from producing medal tables by country as the Olympics "is" a competition between individual athletes (boggle).
Chapter 1, Section 6: The Olympic Games are competitions between athletes in individual or team events and not between countries
Chapter 5, Section 58: The IOC and the OCOG shall not draw up any global ranking per country. A roll of honour bearing the names of medal winners and those awarded diplomas in each event shall be established by the OCOG and the names of the medal winners shall be featured prominently and be on permanent display in the main stadium.
In light of this, I think we need to also consider a rejection of the validity of the addition operation (as each individual is a "different unit"). The only reasonable way to do that, I think, is to draw up a nullary medal table where all "moves" on medal counts are equally invalid (and so valid) and so every country is incomparable (and so comparable) to every other, (and so every medal scores zero).
So I think there's also a trivial reasonable medal table in which all countries are better than all others (including ones which they are worse than) or equivalently no country is comparable to any other (I suspect some countries are not comparable to themselves, but that's another problem!).
The New York Times could have a button where everything either collapses to a dot or else flies away to infinity.
About the producing medal tables by country as the Olympics "is" a competition between individual athletes - I had heard that but hadn't seen "chapter and verse" (so to speak). Interesting; thanks!
Still, the diagram is nifty, as is the fact that the NYT picked it up and credited Simon!
Indeed, and clearly medal tables are an important aspect of the Olympics, despite the IOC's quixotic position, and the parametric kind of scoring which you see is very unsatisfactory. I really like identities, nulls, matrix kernels, and so on, and so was (perhaps a little too) enthusiastic when this one came to mind!
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It's always nice to see American journalists treat people properly. It reminds is that in Britain the Mail would probably have stolen it, got the maths wrong, say the law doesn't apply to them and then threatened any complainant with a smear campaign of dubious veracity. Continental journalists can be quite respectable too, but in a different way. American print journalists always get the details right but sometimes paint the wrong picture, continental print journalists are better at big pictures, but a bit smudgy. British print journalists (and, it seems, the CPS) seem mainly to be wearing dirty macs and sniffing around the bins for discarded polaroids.
Interestingly, in the IOC's charter it is explicitly prohibited from producing medal tables by country as the Olympics "is" a competition between individual athletes (boggle).
Chapter 1, Section 6:
The Olympic Games are competitions between athletes in individual or team events and not between countries
Chapter 5, Section 58:
The IOC and the OCOG shall not draw up any global ranking per country. A roll of honour bearing the names of medal winners and those awarded diplomas in each event shall be established by the OCOG and the names of the medal winners shall be featured prominently and be on permanent display in the main stadium.
In light of this, I think we need to also consider a rejection of the validity of the addition operation (as each individual is a "different unit"). The only reasonable way to do that, I think, is to draw up a nullary medal table where all "moves" on medal counts are equally invalid (and so valid) and so every country is incomparable (and so comparable) to every other, (and so every medal scores zero).
So I think there's also a trivial reasonable medal table in which all countries are better than all others (including ones which they are worse than) or equivalently no country is comparable to any other (I suspect some countries are not comparable to themselves, but that's another problem!).
The New York Times could have a button where everything either collapses to a dot or else flies away to infinity.
:-)
Still, the diagram is nifty, as is the fact that the NYT picked it up and credited Simon!