Master Obit

Big companies find a way of exploiting situations to make even more money. Shock.

Friendly but apparently totally inept. Or is her stupidity just an act?

Have you any peer-reviewed evidence for this?

Do you mean her carers? No chance someone of that level of ineptitude functions independently.

It's a toss up between him, Putin, and Gemma Collins for who I'd like to see placed before a firing squad.

Can't believe someone who got a few credits in the 1960s didn't get an article about their death.

He looked frail at his last birthday so this isn't really a shock. What a life though (ignoring the being a staunch tory).

John Farringdone.

He wouldn't because I supply the deaths for that. OiB has no connection to him - him being listed is simply "not confirmed dead". I was the one who got him listed in the first place. If you want the truth, he was listed in our behind-the-scenes data as "Norman" from a care home post I found of a "106 year old Norman" then I happened to stumble upon Norman Spencer being mentioned on here and I made the connection. There are a handful of people on OiB where we're 99% sure they've died since 2023, but without confirmation we can't mark them as such.

Norman Spencer is due to turn 110 today. I don't expect any articles but I should be able to confirm his status as at the end of March when I visit the archives in a couple of weeks.

Sandy Gall. I was just watching something from the 80s and he looked fairly old then. Edit: looking at posts on his thread he seemed to have been doing alright recently. Must have just been a bad day.

You too. Have a splendid Sunday.

And that's fine. I've no intention of causing offence and the way you judge the success of an Olympics personally is entirely up to you. What I object to is having insults thrown at me for presenting an entirely reasonable counterview backed up by also reasonable figures. It's not really fair - though I'll give you the benefit of the doubt here, it's a hot day and both of us probably got a bit overinvested.

"Data isn't analysed in a fair way, so it's fine for me to not do so as long as it agrees with my opinion" We can do without the insults too, thanks. You're never going to get taken seriously in an intellectual discussion if you aren't willing to go toe to toe on logic without resorting to mudslinging. The fact remains that you've merely cherrypicked a bunch of different metrics for each individual case to try and justify your opinion. There's no statistical rigour in what you've done. First it's margin of victory by seconds, then on the ones where we scraped through it suddenly matters about the margin to other places, then now you're introducing percentages for some. That's cherrypicking. You have to compare equally across everything. If that were to show that there were reasonable grounds for your opinion, I'd willingly accept that. If you really want to debate this further, I'm happy to do so either on here or in private. You accuse me of "crem like content", whilst missing the very irony that crem's very trademark is spouting opinions and cherrypicking to justify them. Has it been a good Olympics? Yes, certainly. Is there grounds to suggest we've underperformed on golds? Certainly open to debate.

We could very easily have lost the triathlon - 6 seconds in a race lasting an hour and three-quarters isn't much at all. 0.43 seconds in the 800m isn't much either. There was 0.29s between 1st and 6th in the men's 100m breaststroke, but you neglected to mention that. We could have ended up 6th. Matt Richards was 0.13s off not medalling at all etc. Fine margins matter at the elite levels, especially on shorter races. You're only arguing from a perspective of "we could have won more golds", as opposed to applying consistent standards across tables. If you want a proper statistical analysis, you've got to compare like for like, as opposed to taking a given notion and massaging the data to show it how you want. This shouldn't detract from us having had a brilliant Olympics and a lot of fine ambassadors, but working in a job where I spend my days analysing data, I feel the urge to point out when things aren't being analysed in a totally fair way.

Gold is gold, silver is silver, and bronze is bronze. As @En Passant has said, unless you're going to also analyse the medals where we won by a fractional margin, you can't really bring this in to it because you aren't doing a fair reflection. There will doubtlessly have been events where we only barely scraped in to a higher place, and either they all get written off as "only just", or none of them do. It's a very successful games, yeah - that's absolutely not up for debate. I don't disagree with you there - we've a lot to be proud of. However, the distinct lack of golds in comparison to previous editions is certainly noticeable and I don't think it's unreasonable to note that.

Not sure why you're facepalming this Rover. I'm by no means suggesting this Olympics is a disaster or even necessarily offering a personal view, but it's a very one-dimensional statistical approach to only consider number of medals as a success metric when the official table itself prioritises golds.

Can someone please explain to me how China did a clean sweep, 8/8 golds, in the diving? Are they really just freakishly good?

That's only one way of looking at it. It's actually our worst since 2004 in terms of golds. Looking at number of golds as the metric, you have 2004: 9 2008: 19 2012: 29 2016: 27 2020: 22 2024: 14 It doesn't look quite so good when you look at it like that.

I think I'll stick to just being stubborn, it seems to have worked so far. I'm also a good few decades off my sixties so probably have some time to go before I need to worry about serious health ailments (he says, having been in A&E last year for heart trouble). I'm a great believer in stubbornness as a solution to problems. Also, was it you who posted a while back about dating a Brexiteer? Did that work out? I feel we never got a conclusion to that debate.

I actually love birthday cards, I keep them in a box and occasionally reread them when I'm feeling a bit down. I've got no chance of getting to 90 with my family's cardiac history so I'm enjoying the love while I can. I think I'll start recognising half-birthdays if I reach 70, and maybe quarter-birthdays if I reach 80 because it will be such a phenomenal achievement seeing as how no direct male ancestors of mine have reached that age.

This is quite a big death because her presence was so persistent, even just as a name on the information page. I suppose 56 years, many of them with exorbitant wealth, may be a better life than the 80 years of scraping by that many people get.

The issue is that I have normally bought everything I'd like from the charity shops before anyone else could find them. I am a serial charity shop frequenter.

The issue I have is that the material things I would really value most nowadays are either extremely hard to get or too expensive for it to be reasonable for me to expect someone to buy them for me. The thing I care about most is time now, and all my friends know that I much prefer them to put some time in to writing me a nice message in a card and making time to see me as opposed to feeling it necessary to get me something at this specific time. Their time is my present. The best physical presents are when people get you something at a random time in the year because they saw it and thought of you in the moment. For family that insist on getting me something, I struggle more and more each year in suggesting things. Christmas is even worse. I don't like that society imposes a belief that it's required to tokenistically shove a present at someone when you never bother making time to see them ordinarily.

Nothing fills me with dread more than people asking what I want for my upcoming birthday. I can never decide how much of their money I'm willing to spend. The restaurant that I have been going to every birthday for a couple of decades has become unsupportable because they have introduced robots to bring the food out, which on principle I can't agree with because it does people out of work. I am quite disappointed by this, I'm a creature of habit and don't like being forced to deviate from what is an ingrained custom.