Inspired by John Allen Paulos, who just now tweeted
Obvious, but NBC hasn’t said: Canada, Norway, Germany way ahead of US in Olympic medals per capita. Many ways to rank: Cf. Arrow’s theorem.
I decided to redo the medals list. Here, the number of medals per capita among the top countries.
| Country | Gold/capita | Silver/capita | Bronze/capita | Total/capita |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Norway | 1.23E-06 | 6.17E-07 | 1.03E-06 | 2.88E-06 |
| Austria | 3.58E-07 | 3.58E-07 | 3.58E-07 | 1.07E-06 |
| Slovenia | 0 | 4.87E-07 | 4.87E-07 | 9.74E-07 |
| Switzerland | 6.43E-07 | 0 | 2.57E-07 | 9.00E-07 |
| Latvia | 0 | 8.90E-07 | 0 | 8.90E-07 |
| Sweden | 3.21E-07 | 2.14E-07 | 2.14E-07 | 7.49E-07 |
| Estonia | 0 | 7.46E-07 | 0 | 7.46E-07 |
| Slovakia | 1.84E-07 | 1.84E-07 | 1.84E-07 | 5.53E-07 |
| Croatia | 0 | 2.25E-07 | 2.25E-07 | 4.51E-07 |
| Netherlands | 1.81E-07 | 6.03E-08 | 6.03E-08 | 3.01E-07 |
| Canada | 1.47E-07 | 1.18E-07 | 2.94E-08 | 2.94E-07 |
| Czech republic | 9.51E-08 | 0 | 1.90E-07 | 2.85E-07 |
| Germany | 8.56E-08 | 1.10E-07 | 6.12E-08 | 2.57E-07 |
These badges are also displayed on my About page, but the explanation why merits a blog post of its own.

For one thing, I blog about the stuff. I also was a radio speaker at the time that Radio Unga Forskare was active.

This blog. Do I really need to say more?

I’m an old boy scout. I came 3rd in the national quals for the International Chemistry Olympiad back when. I do know how to handle a flame in a lab.

Dry ice? Of course. Unga Forskare (the association of Young Scientists) responsible for this.

Liquid nitrogen? Oh yes! Favourite pastime among Unga Forskare.

I really do know more computer languages than quite a few people. Then again, there are some who know more than I do, and sure, most of those end up reading this blog, so .. well .. call it a draw, shall we?
Syntaxfree writes over at his blog about a silly little toy he wrote, using the PFP library, to generate random text.
Now, his text is unreadable. I mean, it’s even unpronounceable. Why? Because he’s looking at bigram distributions of letter.
Great, I thought, I’ll do him one better. Random text using bigram distributions on words must surely be a LOT better than random text using bigram distributions on letters. At least the words come out readable, and they may even come out in a decent order.
So I sat down with his code, and hacked, tweaked, and monadized it to this