My Hasse diagram done better

[simont]

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

Comments

[cartesiandaemon]

Huh. That's amazingly ethical and competent of them! I guess it's a shame I'm surprised a major newspaper is ethical and competent, but still, kudos to them. And to you for the idea.

[simont]

and presumably, therefore, it keeps running track as more medals are won

Addendum: we can drop 'presumably', since I've now seen it do so.

[gerald_duck]

I see Matthew Bloch's name on the article. Matt Bee was at King's College a decade or so ago, may be familiar to many people reading this and is known, by me at least, to be competent. (-8

[gerald_duck]

I note in passing that the NY Times logo for London 2012 is yet another example of something nicer than the official Simpsons-fellation one.

[atreic]

That's very nicely done.

The adjusting for population one is very funny though - I like the strategy of 'win one gold medal, have very few people' adopted by Grenada!

[simont]

Yes, that is unfortunately the problem with per-head or per-dollar-GDP systems; they seem a fairer way in principle to judge merit irrespective of size, but when countries get down to the point where the expected rate of medal-winning is a fraction of a medal per Olympics they develop the problem that the interesting parts of the table are composed of noise rather than signal...

[pseudomonas]

Though Jamaica has done rather well even not taking population into account :)