Why is it that whenever I see a headline along the lines of “[something something something] mayoral candidate says,” if I think “gee, that ‘[something something something]‘ is totally ass,” the “mayoral candidate” is Rocco Rossi?

Given Canada’s gold resurgence, and the wishful argument that gold is really the medal that matters, I’ve added columns based on gold medals only.

For display I’ve broken it into three charts. The first based on total medals. The second based on gold medals. The third just showing the average quick ranking of the two.

I also fixed a mistake in the “Medals/10,000,000 People” formula, those numbers were wrong before (for some reason it was assuming everybody had exactly 24 medals).

As before, clicking will open the full image if it’s looking compressed in the main post.

Canada’s by far the biggest country near the top of that list, so maybe that’s an accomplishment? I guess the marketing was just off. Instead of “Own the podium” it should have been “Own the podium so far as mid-sized high income countries go when favouring gold medals in determining rank.” Yes!

Otherwise, Norway’s still kicking ass.

Canadian researches “have found that the eye perceives red as moving faster than other colours.”

And a hierarchy: “The researchers found that there’s a hierarchy of colours when it comes to speed of eye movement, with red at the top, then green, yellow and blue.”

The headline-worthiness of the article comes then from the leap that olympic judges may perceive athletes in red as moving slightly faster, which could be an advantage.

But this wasn’t a test for that. Instead of having “five participants” take part in “thousands of tests where they watched coloured dots moving on a computer screen,” you need a test where a legitimate sample of people watch objects of various colours moving in a more human-type of path, and see how they estimate speed. Presumably that’s been done before.

There’s also a leap to go from “the eye moves faster when tracking red objects” to “red objects seem to move faster.”

The study authors seem aware of the limits, but the article likes to blow things out of proportion.

Red is dangerous. Our body pays more attention to tracking it. Maybe wearing red makes the judges sense fear on some level. How about that? Stupid article.

Well, not exactly.

So I’m not sure if there’s an easy way to go from .ods to an html table or something, so until I figure that out the fastest thing is going to be a screenshot.

Below is a list of all currently medal-winning countries (according to Yahoo), with data added from Wikipedia for population and GDP (PPP).^*

(click image to view in full res)

Great Britain sucks. Norway Rules. Conveniently, I already have an “I’m moving to Norway” category.

^*I had a brief internal struggle about PPP vs. nominal. I settled without much thought. Maybe Olympic skill is something that some countries can produce more cheaply? I don’t know.

It reads:

Own the Podium dream over: Canadian official

Really?

We need an official statement?

I assumed it was a goal rather than an expectation. That these people seem to have seriously thought otherwise is strange, and seems to only hurt them, because it means they’re both ridiculous and failures. As opposed to the Olympians, who have performed admirably both in their events and in the face of countless reporters asking them “How disappointed are you?” or of each other “How disappointed should we be?” With the athletes, not very. With yourselves, very.

Morons.

The headline of this Canadian Press article (via CBC) seems blatantly terrible: “5 Muslims jailed for Australian terror plot.”

At least throw the word “extremist” in there.

It seems lost will end with its worst season ever, so that’s good.

24 got bad fast, usually it takes a few more episodes for me to decide I can’t watch anymore. Although I do like what seems to be the message of this season. The message is no longer that torture is ok in extreme situations, it’s that torture is ok in extreme situations if and only if the person doing the torturing is Jack.

So there’s a deal. And apparently it’s the same one rejected a year ago, but I’m not sure about the validity of that claim.

In any case, James Laxer seems to hit one of the main veins of criticism on this:

In return for this “concession” from Washington, Ottawa has agreed to pay an unacceptably high price. Under the deal, Canadian provinces and municipalities will permanently give up the right to favour local companies in awarding contracts.

So we’re upset because to get something from them, we’ve had to give the same thing in return?

Then there’s the issue–which James hits on in the title of his post–that parliament isn’t sitting, so there’s no debate on this. And presumably the whole thing’s meaningless until ratified by parliament, though I’m not clear on whether that’s the case.

Um. Canada has better health care because Canada has better health outcomes. Not because it treats rich people better than everyone else.