I'm a lifelong sports fan. Only in my mid 20's did I start becoming interested in business. One of the first things I noticed is how similar the business page is to the sports page. People follow companies like they're sports teams, gathering detailed statistics (profit, market cap, etc), analyzing match-ups (Microsoft vs Yahoo), discussing all-stars (Steve Jobs), etc.
Techcrunch is our Sports Illustrated.
Being that an in depth knowledge of football and related player stats gives me no benefit or edge in my pursuits, I choose not to dedicate time that could be better spent actively doing or learning on spectating.
I don't like sports, but usually watch the Olympics if I can. Humans have a 1000 or so physical characteristics, and it's interesting to see their upper limits approached.
It gives you something to talk about besides the weather. That's a huge part of the draw. If it weren't for sports, what would you do as you sat around drinking in a bar with your friends?
Also: Athletic people are fun to look at. And sports offer a nice balance between the predictable results of hours of practice and careful strategic planning (everyone loves it when a plan comes together) and the drama that arises from random factors (as Yogi Berra supposedly said, "it isn't over until it's over").
FWIW, my friends cover a fairly wide variety of demographics, they are not all geeks or startup people, but they all have the ability to discuss things they are actively involved in in one way or another.
However, I don't see people walking around with hats and jerseys with their favorite actors name on it the way you do for sports.
I do enjoy many mainstream forms of entertainment (TV, music, movies, etc) I just don't obsess over the smallest details of the entertainers, awards they have won, etc.
From my perspective, I would rather take credit for something I have personally done (alone or as part of a team).
Yes. Yes you do. How many clothing lines exist solely because of some celebrity? Examples here: http://fashion.about.com/cs/celebritystyle/a/celebritylines.....
The difference is that the vapid celebrity culture is even more imitated than sports stars, but for even less apparent reasons. At least sports starts have accomplished something, even if it is ultimately not terribly meaningful.
If you think that watching SportsCenter everyday and debating sports with your friends is any different than us reading hacker news and enjoying debating about it, then you are just suffering a delusion of superiority. It has nothing to do taking credit for this or that, the debate is what interest people and the statistics are just the weapons.
Even a weekend warrior gains from watching watching their sport.
2 minutes to get the medal tally, clean it up in excel and format out the country titles correct.
1 minute to Paste in Goog spreadsheet, setup GoogleLookup queries on each country for GDP / Pop.
2 minutes to fix up the 5 or so countries that it didn't recognise - Korea --> South Korea, Russian Federation --> Russia, Dominican Rep. --> Dominican Republic
And then I looked closely at the data Google pulled back...
China: * GDP: - "$10 trillion (2006 est.) (purchasing power parity)", * Population: - "1,313,973,713 (July 2006 est.)"
USA: * GDP: - "2006 estimate" * Population - "31/km² (172nd)" (A few other countries had similar results)
(Sure, it probably just means that wikipedia is formatted differently for some countries, but it ruined my efforts.. Even so - I still got 95% of the data within about 5 minutes, and links to wikipedia pages that probably contained the rest..)
--- And with a bit more digging it seems that Google is just getting the figures wrong from wikipedia.. Lots of the countries came from the CIA World fact book - that had the correct numbers in GSpreadsheet; but if it goes to Wikipedia it seems to grab the Pop. Density and not the Pop.
Dear Google - please fix your scraper. :)
At the risk of sounding overly negative, I don't really get what the hype about the Olympics, or professional sports is all about. People seem to put a lot of time/effort into watching, tracking, following various sports, but I don't see what the benefit is to being a rabid spectator. It's not like more gold medals == some improvement to society or economy. Same thing when one random sports team bests another in some championship or tournament, no measurable increase (save for the increased revenue to sports paraphernalia dealers).