Summer Olympics Wrap-Up

The Rio Olympics have come and gone! Although there was great anxiety that it would be a cluster****, the games seem to have gone off just fine.

Because we don't have TV at home, Katie and I were only able to watch a few select events that were made available by the BBC - mostly synchronized diving and wrestling. I have a few take-aways from having watched ~20 hours of coverage of these events:

• The BBC announcer for synchronized diving should announce all events! That guy was amazing! "Oh wow, what a dive! If that were a steak, it would be medium-rare - just perfect!" "I am literally out of my seat right now!" "Oh, goodness, she just fell like a tree - timberrrrrrrr!"
• Freestyle wrestling is more enjoyable to watch than Greco-Roman wrestling. Greco-Roman seemed to be 90% handwrestling and leaning into each other with occasional passivity penalty scores. Freestyle was more offense-driven.
• Women's wresting is more enjoyable to watch than men's. By and large women's wrestling was more aggressive, more dramatic, and more interesting. At least 50% of the medals were determined by a score in the final seconds of the match whereas men's matches always seemed to go to whoever was ahead halfway through the second period.
• There may be no crying in baseball but there is a lot of crying in wrestling! Interestingly, while the men tended to cry in victory, the women tended to cry in defeat (and beam in victory). There are several potential psychology and sociology papers to be written about that phenomenon!
• IMD has truly transformed the way I watch the Olympics. Previously I only really cared about the USA but this year I found myself cheering for Azerbaijani and Belarusian wrestlers out of solidarity with my MBA classmates. Frankly the Olympics is more fun and interesting to watch when you care about more countries than just your own!

But really, on to the real question at hand: who "won" the Olympics? Per my previous posts, I continue to use a weighted scoring system to tally up Olympic medals by country. This year I tracked not just the top performers but every country that won at least one medal - you can see my full spreadsheet here.

The USA won in every category: golds, silvers, bronzes, total medals, and weighted medal score. The top performers by weighted medal score were:

1. 379 - USA
2. 221 - Great Britain
3. 210 - China
4. 168 - Russia
5. 130 - Germany
6. 118 - France
7. 105 - Japan
8. 084 - Italy
9. 083 - Australia
10. 065 - Netherlands

Russia's lackluster performance wasn't much of a surprise as they were banned from track and field competition. China's performance, on the other hand, was a big shock. They went from a weighted medal score of 346 (#1 overall) in 2008 to 294 in 2012 (#2 overall) all the way down to 210 this year - a very distant 3rd. What could account for this precipitous drop? They had home field advantage in 2008 but that surely wasn't responsible for 100% of their peak performance back then.

This year there were many discussions not just of overall medal counts but also of countries that "punched above their weight." Accordingly, I added population and GDP as normalization metrics to the spreadsheet. The top performers by weighted medal score per million citizens were:

1. 30.00 - Grenada
2. 15.79 - Bahamas
3. 13.90 - Jamaica
4. 11.04 - New Zealand
5. 08.59 - Croatia
6. 06.13 - Denmark
7. 05.83 - Slovenia
8. 05.75 - Fiji
9. 05.71 - Bahrain
10. 05.38 - Hungary

The top performers by weighted medal score per $B GDP (PPP) were:

1. 3.00 - Grenada
2. 1.64 - Jamaica
3. 0.67 - Bahamas
4. 0.63 - Fiji
5. 0.56 - Armenia
6. 0.53 - North Korea
7. 0.47 - Georgia
8. 0.38 - Burundi
9. 0.37 - Croatia
10. 0.34 - Kenya

The top performers by weighted medal score per $1,000 GDP per capita were:

1. 15.42 - Kenya
2. 13.86 - China
3. 12.71 - North Korea
4. 10.06 - Ethiopia
5. 06.62 - USA
6. 06.57 - Russia
7. 05.66 - Uzbekistan
8. 05.37 - Great Britain
9. 04.83 - Jamaica
10. 03.79 - Burundi

My friend, colleague, and data scientist extraordinaire took the liberty of throwing the spreadsheet into Tableau for visualization - check it out for a more engaging analysis!

Wine Cooler Problem Solving

In addition to our wine cellar in the basement, we maintain a medium-sized wine cooler in our kitchen for bottles that are ready to drink now. Although we keep that cooler set to 13 degrees C (55 F), recently it has been reporting temperatures several degrees higher.

This was perplexing as the device is only a few years old (so the cooling mechanism shouldn't be failing) and, even during the day when our A/C is off, the ambient temperature is well within the device's operating range (so the cooling mechanism shouldn't be overworked). The cooler is a thermoelectric unit, so it doesn't have condenser coils that need to be cleaned/vacuumed for efficiency either.

On a whim, I pulled the cooler out from the wall thinking that maybe increasing the airflow behind it could help. While I didn't find that the increased airflow helped, I did find a tremendous amount of dog hair and dust caked to the back of the cooler!

Even though the device doesn't have coils that need to be vacuumed, it apparently does have vents in the back for circulating out warmer air. When those get plugged up, the warm air has nowhere to go, so vacuuming/cleaning them is apparently important.

After vacuuming the vents, the internal temperature of the cooler began dropping within minutes, eventually reaching 13 degrees C. I had assumed there was no point in looking behind the cooler because there weren't any coils there - but that's where the problem turned out to be anyway.

This is a good reminder to challenge my assumptions; when the evidence doesn't fit those assumptions, they may be wrong. Now I think I'll toast this solved mystery with a nice, cool white burgundy . . .

Cooling Off In August

I went for a run this morning and was surprised to notice that the first signs of autumn are already evident. A few yellow leaves were falling and a sporadic, cool breeze was blowing.

Even though we've been in NC for three years now, I'm still incredulous that August could be anything but the sweltering peak of heat and humidity that I knew for so long in Houston. I suppose this turning of the corner toward autumn happened when I lived in Virginia as well, but it was always hidden from me by football two-a-days.

Regardless, it is very welcome - especially when running! I love each of the seasons in different ways but the times of transition between them are fun reminders that we live once again in a place with four of them.

Summer Track 2016 PRs

Another summer track season has come and gone and this year I was running with power. Below are my PRs from this year's events with previous years' PRs in parentheses:

100m: 13.6s (12.7s)
200m: 28.54s (27.69s)
400m: 1:05 (1:03)
800m: 2:30 (2:31)
1,000m: 3:17 (3:19)
1,500m: 5:19 (5:21)
1 Mile: 5:44 (5:51)
3,000m: 11:41 (11:39)
5,000m: N/A (20:14)
10,000m: N/A (44:15)

I didn't focus on any of the sprint events this season and only "raced" the 800m-3,000m, where I mostly saw improvement. One takeaway is that, if I'm going to go for a PR in a longer track race (3,000m or 5,000m), I need to do it earlier in the season, when it is still cooler. Once the weather reaches peak heat/humidity, the prospect of sustaining PR pace for more than 10 minutes after two hours of other events (The longest distance races are always at the end of the night.) becomes less and less likely.

Sir Walter Miler

Last night Katie and I took advantage of our proximity to Raleigh and attended the Sir Walter Miler. It's an annual race at which elite runners try to set new records in the mile. It was a really fun environment as spectators were allowed down on the track during the races to cheer on the athletes.

How did those athletes do? The winning woman finished the mile in 4:25 and the winning man finished in 3:54. Those numbers are impressive enough, but it was even more impressive to see what a sub-4:00 mile looks like up close and personal!

Afterward, Katie and I rewarded ourselves for our excellent spectating by visiting nearby FRESH, our favorite ice cream in the Triangle!