The Question is, why didn't China win ALL the Gold medals

If the olympics were won by talent, then China would probably win all the gold medals. They have over 1.3 Billion people. Just assume a normal distribution and there should be LOTS of great runners, swimmers, weight lifters and yes... ping-pong players. The fact that they don't win them all tells us something (I'm not sure what) about the impact of money and training facilities. I was looking for some statistics on population and gold medal performance (I don't think there is any honest statistics on the MONEY spent per athelete), and I came across a page from Punch, Nigeria's most widely read newspaper (It says so on the banner) that listed some interesting facts from the China Olympics which I have copied below. They had more, in fact, one for every American Gold medal, (36 if you weren't paying attention), but I found some more interesting than others.

It’s the first time since 1936 that a country other than the United States or the Soviet Union has led the medal count. Hmmm, does this mean the cold war IS officially over???

Per capita, China won one gold medal for every 25 million people in the country. The United States’ per capita rate was one gold medal for every 8.5 million. The tiny island nation of Jamaica, which won a staggering six gold medals in Beijing, had a per capita rate of one gold for every 450,000 residents. Had China won at that rate, the country would have earned 2,889 gold medals.

Six countries won their first ever Olympic medals: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Mauritius, Sudan, Tajikistan and Togo. Panama and Mongolia won the first gold medals in their respective histories (they had won other medals before, but never gold)

India has 17% of the world’s population. They won 0.31% of Olympic medals.
China: 19.8% of population, 10.4% of medals.
United States: 4.6% of population, 11.5% medals.


Jamaica: 0.041% of population, 1.15% medals.

Iceland was the least populous country to win an Olympic medal.

Pakistan was the most populous country not to win an Olympic medal (164 million residents, sixth-largest nation in the world).

More proof that boxing is dead in the United States: the country earned just one medal (a bronze) in the 12 boxing events.

From 1980 to 2008, Jamaica won three Olympic gold medals. In a span of six days in Beijing, Usain Bolt won three.

And finally, if Michael Phelps were a country of his own, he would have finished tied for 9th in the gold medal count, ahead of countries including France, Netherlands, Spain, Canada, Argentina, Switzerland, Brazil and Mexico.

A question of my own... Softball was eliminated from the summer Olympics because the US won it so steadily. Can we assume that ping-pong and diving may soon be on their way out? The sad truth is that the political legacy we leave around the world will impact our atheletes on the Olympic fields.

two times two is five??? by Lewis Carroll

I recently came across an example of Carroll's cross between wit and logic in a 2008 Gresham lecture by Robin Wilson:

Honoured Sir,



Understanding you to be a distinguished algebraist (that is, distinguished from other algebraists by different face, different height, etc.), I beg to submit to you a difficulty which distresses me much.

If x and y are each equal to 1, it is plain that


2 × (x2 - y2) = 0, and also that 5 × (x - y) = 0.


Hence 2 × (x2 - y2) = 5 × (x - y).


Now divide each side of this equation by (x - y).


Then 2 × (x + y) = 5.


But (x + y) = (1 + 1), i.e. = 2. So that 2 × 2 = 5.

Ever since this painful fact has been forced upon me, I have not slept more than 8 hours a night, and have not been able to eat more than 3 meals a day.

I trust you will pity me and will kindly explain the difficulty to Your obliged, Lewis Carroll.

Etymological Musings

Sometimes in the summer (oh, sweet summertime, where have you flown.... school bells tinkling in my near future...and I am SOOOOO NOT ready) I find time to wander through the blogs of folks who understand and explain word origins. Recently I came across a couple of interesting words that I thought I would share. I meant to do this a couple of days ago, but got busy and put it off... and one of the words was about that very thing.
Everyone knows the word procrastinate, but not everyone know that the word literally means to move forward to tomorrow. The Latin root, I learned, is procrastinare, and the pro prefix means forward. Crastinus means tomorrow, and together they represent that evil practice of putting off today's job until tomorrow. Cicero, in an attack on Mark Antony said, "... slowness and procrastination are hateful". But I came across an even more appropriate term for my summer behavior,perendinate
which means to put something off until the day after tomorrow, which is the literal interpretation of perendie. There is a lot more about procrastination and its interpretation in many languages and cultures at Ben Zimmer's SLATE.
If you watched the National Spelling Bee, you might have heard another interesting word, hyphaeresis, which is an example of what it means. It is the name for the act of leaving out a letter or syllable in a word; in hyphaeres the omitted letter is the "o" from hypo, which is Greek for below, as in hypodermic (below the skin) and hypotenuse, the longest side of a right triangle which literally means "to stretch below".
As long as I am amusing you with interesting words (I AM amusing you...right???) I will add one more.."stamina". OK, you know what stamina means, or at least how it is commonly used now...but do you know how it is related to stamin, the sexual part of a flower (Yeah, I said the magic word and NOW you are interested..)? Here, said better than I could ever do, are the words of the original blogger
"Before stamen meant "The male or fertilizing organ of a flowering plant," it meant 'the warp in an upright loom' (the Latin word stāmen is from the Proto-Indo-European root *stā- 'stand'), and from there it came to mean (in the OED's words) "The thread spun by the Fates at a person's birth, on the length of which the duration of his life was suppose[d] to depend. Hence, in popular physiology, the measure of vital impulse or capacity which it was supposed that each person possessed at birth, and on which the length of his life, unless cut short by violence or disease, was supposed to depend.' (1709 Tatler No. 15.1 'All, who enter into human life, have a certain date or Stamen given to their being, which they only who die of age may be said to have arrived at'; 1753 L. M. Accompl. Woman I. 246 "Bad example hath not less influence upon education than a bad stamen upon the constitution.") Hence the plural stamina meant "The congenital vital capacities of a person or animal, on which (other things being equal) the duration of life was supposed to depend; natural constitution as affecting the duration of life or the power of resisting debilitating influences" (1701 C. WOLLEY Jrnl. New York 60 'Such as have the natural Stamina of a consumptive propagation in them'; 1823 GILLIES Aristotle's Rhet. I. v. 180 "If the stamina are not sound, disease will soon ensue"), and finally the modern sense "Vigour of bodily constitution; power of sustaining fatigue or privation, of recovery from illness, and of resistance to debilitating influences; staying power" (1726 SWIFT Let. Sheridan 27 July Wks. 1841 II. 588/1, "I indeed think her stamina could not last much longer when I saw she could take no nourishment"). This was originally construed as a plural, but by the nineteenth century careless writers were using it as a singular (1834 M. SCOTT Cruise Midge viii, 'Why, Sir Oliver, the man is exceedingly willing,.. but his stamina is gone entirely'), and this rapidly became standard."

2015:  As a footnote, my brother-in-law worked for several years in the Pondicherry area of India and he says it was common there for folks to use the word "prepone" as a variant of postpone, to move a meeting forward.  Makes perfect sense if you realize that the "pone" is from the Latin "ponere", to put or place, so prepone, just means to put it forward.  A check of the OED suggests that this is only used in India, but it seems like a perfectly good word.  Tell  your students you want to prepone their test two days.  That should get their interest in vocabulary pumping. 

NY Times Editors Need Math Help

The article was on August ninth in the Times, with a title of Chinese Basketball Builds Toward Podium... It was a nice article, polite, balanced, and informative...and then it had a paragraph that said
"With 300,000 million people playing basketball across the country — roughly the same number as the population of the United States — and with money being poured into the sport at the youth level, China is aiming to make the medal round at these Olympics."
Ok, now look up the population of China... and the USA.... Keep this in mind the next time the TIMES decides to publish an article on the inability of America's youth to do mathematics.