Scoring

ECONOMIES
How do you rate an economy? Is GDP any good? Why should repairing after natural disasters count? And childcare counts, but only if you are paying someone for it?

SPORTS
Even sports — scoring a ski race seems obvious enough. Who is fastest down the course? But some events have 2 runs and others 1 and yet others are head-to-head. What should the start order be? And how do you figure out who is doing the best in a season? A straight average of their individual race rankings? So if you were 1st, 2nd, and 6th, you are 3rd overall (1+2+6)/3 (That’s not how FIS does it! It uses a sorta exponential curve to give more weight to top finishes)

In luge it’s a similar problem as skiing, but guess what… their point system is SLIGHTLY different. WHY?!?!

Then onto rock climbing / sport climbing. At the 2020 Olympics they MULTIPLIED scores between events. That seemed nuts to me, and some others? Scoring at 2024 will be different because of course it was indeed nuts!

CLIMBING IN THE OLYMPICS – How the scoring system influenced the outcome.

But guess what, a common way to score a lead event (where one climbs multiple walls) is to
1. rank climbers, with ties splitting the difference (so two tied for 2nd place are both 2.5, three tied for 2nd place… that’s (2+3+4/3)=3 !)
2. Then… MULTIPLY their rankings (“rang” in Québécois French), so if you ranked 1,2,3 on thee walls of the competition, your overall points are 8. And lowest points win!

Anyway, I hope a mathematician comes to the rescue of some of these sports. Skiing and luge are closest to sane, but there must be some way we can agree on what exponential falloff to use!

GREEN BUILDINGS
A passivhaus/passive-house or zero or positive energy house is indeed cool, but not if you now used a lot of energy and emissions to build it. Nor if you will be driving more than you used to! ( We found that our extra driving from our house in Stow EASILY offset (well, undid) the extra insulation and solar panels.) Less driving for the win.

OFFICES
The ultimate example of that (of course) is the one that we learned thanks to covid. The best office — green-scoring wise — is NO office! Because commuting! Even innovative ideas like “negawatts” from 1990 didn’t think about commuting.