Blue Memphis

Wife: Why is your pee pee blue?

Me: My what?

Wife: Your pee pee ... why is it blue?

Me: What am I, 5 years old? My PEE PEE, seriously?

Wife: Oh shut up. Why is it blue?

Me: I don't know. It's just hanging there not doing anything. Why does it matter? Maybe it's blue because it's lonely? Maybe you need to pay more attention to it?

Wife: Oh ha ha.


Well, the Summer Olympics are over. NBC has been obsessing over the medal count. Oh China has more gold than we do, but we have more overall than anyone. And China cheated with those toddlers in gymnastics, dammit!

Here's something to think about:

The United States has 110 medals.
China has 100
Russia has 72
The UK has 47
Australia has 46

Now let's consider an important factor. Every nation has to pull its' finest athletes from its' available population. So the more people a nation has, the more talent it should have available. What would the medal count look like if we corrected for population differences? I mean, China has over a billion people. How many medals would the United States have if we factored in the population difference? What would the medal count be for all of the top 5 in an equal world?

China has an estimated population of 1,321,851,888
The US has 301,139,947
Russia has 141,377,752
The United Kingdom has 60,776,238
Australia has 20,434,176

So, China has 4.4 more people than the United States, 9.4 more than Russia, 21.8 more than the UK, and 64.7 more than Australia. Let's factor this in and see what the new medal count would look like:

United States - 484 medals
China - 100 medals
Russia - 677 medals (anyone else notice that they have some of the fastest white women in the world in track?)
UK - 1025 medals
Australia - 2976 medals

So, Australia would have blown away everyone else by a mile if they just had more people. Which is why I need to move there. I used to be really good in track.

OK, OK, I know this isn't entirely scientific. I just multiplied the existing medal counts by the difference in population with China. It's a little more complicated than that even from a purely mathematical perspective, but even so, it was fun and would probably stir up a lot of excitement among the math challenged reporters at NBC.




Olympic competition