The polling site for this 
video was powered by Fasthosts.
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There's a link in the description,
and a question at the end of the video.
This isn't the first time that 
this question's been asked.
Several web projects have 
tried to answer it before,
some are still running, 
and some are defunct.
And the question itself has 
been used as a punchline,
asked by an inept, self-obsessed 
radio DJ character.
"What is... the best thing?"
Of course there isn't a meaningful 
answer to that question. Of course.
But I think there are 
some really interesting  
challenges in trying to 
find an answer anyway,
and the results can reveal a 
lot more than you might think.
The first problem is 
trying to list everything.
I know it's an obvious 
thing to say, but:
there are a lot of 
things in the universe.
So let's reduce the scope to  
"everything that most people 
could form an opinion about".
How do you get a list 
of everything like that?
Well, the starting point is Wikidata.
Everything that has a Wikipedia 
article also has an entry in Wikidata,
but so does every category of things,  
every property that 
something might have,
and every link and connection 
between all of those.
And it's all designed to 
be processed by computers.
So I figured I'd start 
by downloading it.
More than a terabyte of data,
more than 88 million things
exhaustively described.
And most of those things 
are not interesting.
More than that, they're going to 
be a mystery to almost everyone.
Every named location in the world
no matter how obscure,
every species and genus of animal, 
enormous numbers of scholarly articles.
If you show most of those to people 
and ask them to form an opinion,
the answer isn't just 
going to be "I don't know":
it'll be "I don't care".
So I had to filter 
those 88 million things.
And the first steps were 
actually kind of easy.
First, I removed all 
listings for people.
We're ranking things, so someone 
else can do "who is the best person".
You're welcome to that.
But I just removed any item that 
was tagged with Q5, "human".
And that's good, that's a good start.
Also, I removed all listings for 
groups of people, because: yikes.
Next, places. If you're doing 
"what is the best thing",
no country or river or building
is ever going to win,
it'll get voted down by political rivalries
or people elsewhere  who've never heard of it,
so if the item was tagged 
with a latitude and longitude,
it also got thrown out.
Also, anything tagged as 
fictional got removed too:
not works of art themselves,  
but characters and events 
that aren't part of reality.
That still left an 
enormous number of items.
But we're only looking for things 
that most people will know about,
and there's a really 
good metric for that:
I kept anything that had a Wikipedia article
in at least fifty different languages.
I tried different thresholds for that,
but fifty seemed to have 
the right balance where
almost everything that remained 
would be recognisable to most people.
And that brought it down to 8,850 things.
Which is a managable number.
But there was no way to 
automate the last part.
I had to manually check through all 
those thousands of things to find  
the bad ones.
Not just things that most people 
would vote against because they're  
unpleasant or harmful,
but things that no-one should be asking 
about in a lighthearted web poll.
Crimes against the person.
A couple of disturbing things that were 
just listed as "rituals".
Anything to do with the Nazis. 
Which it turns out is quite a lot.
They kept showing up under 
apparently-innocent categories?
Like, eugenics was just 
tagged as "social philosophy".
Mein Kampf, just listed 
as "written work".
Unless you kept constantly vigilant 
for them, they kept trying to sneak in.
Then there were the dull 
groups of things that could  
be summed up in a single entry instead.
Every time zone. Every language,
every  country's flag and national anthem.
Every individual book 
of every religious text.
A lot of mythological figures who weren't
tagged as either "human" or "fictional".
Hundreds of generic names of galaxies--
"Okay, you know what? I talked 
about that for far too long.
"Let's just say I removed the boring 
ones, okay? There were a lot of them.
"Let's skip forward."
And then, there was the vandalism.
All of which has since been corrected, 
but in the snapshot I downloaded,
someone had replaced the title of 
"graphics" with "Pro player de fifa"
and the description of 
"worm" with "dog go fishing".
Also, "pipe organ" was described as 
"wind instrument that causes cancer".
So there's someone out there who 
really, really doesn't like pipe organs.
When all was done: 7,188 things.
I knew it wasn't going to be perfect,
people would still find mistakes,
and they did.
But it was good enough. It was time 
to ask the world which was best.
One of the best approaches 
for ranking items in a list
is to show them to people two at a time,
and then ask them to pick 
the best of each random pair.
The best ones will be 
consistently voted for,
and the worst ones voted against.
And as long as you have 
enough votes in total,
you don't need to keep track 
of all the different pairings:
just the total number of wins 
and losses for each item.
Now, I've written code 
to do that before,
so I just reused it, put 
a quick site together,  
and launched it out on Twitter.
My code broke immediately 
because I'd forgotten to change  
one line before going live,
I fixed it within a minute or so while 
a hundred people rushed to tweet me
about something I obviously 
already knew about. Anyway. So.
Five hours and more than 
1.2 million votes later,
the order of items had settled down,
and I closed the poll before anyone 
wrote code to try and break it.
Now, you'll remember that each 
pairing was randomly chosen.
That means some items had more match-ups 
than others, just through sheer luck.
The outliers were "mold",
which was in 125 match-ups,
and "canal", which was in 236.
There was the expected 
distribution between those.
So, at this point, we 
had ranked everything.
I don't want to spend too much 
time on the bottom of the list.
It's a lot of nasty diseases 
and unpleasant concepts.
Also one of the Twilight movies.
I will say that The Worst 
Thing... is Lyme disease.
I've no idea why.
It did significantly worse than
everything else, by a good margin.
Maybe, statistically, out 
of the thousands of items,
one had to get a lot 
of unlucky matchups?
But, honestly, it is a really 
long way below any other item.
"Coronavirus", also fairly low.
And anything religious did 
quite poorly, which makes sense:
if you're not religious 
you're rarely going to  
vote for anything to do with faith,
and if you are religious  
you're hardly ever going to vote 
anything other than your own faith.
In hindsight, I should have 
done something like consolidate
all the entries for faiths into 
one just called "religion".
Which I'm sure wouldn't have 
caused me any problems at all.
Anyway. The best things.
First, let's be clear:  
these are the results as voted by 
the people who follow me on Twitter.
This is about "the best thing" 
as decided by, if we're honest,
a group of English-speaking, 
extremely-online nerds.
However, that's also going to be a lot 
of the people who watch this video,
so, I think it's fair to say,  
as voted by you: here are 
the top ten best things.
At number 10, privacy.
And ranked above privacy, 
at number 9, pizza.
Is pizza better or more important 
than privacy? [indecisive noise]
...but pizza is more likely to win a 
match-up, and that's what counts here!
By the way, the next highest 
food was ice cream, at number 43,
and while that could imply that
my audience have the palates of five-year-olds,
I think it's more that, while those 
may not be everyone's favourite foods,
there are very few people 
who actively dislike them,
so they'll win a lot of generic 
match-ups just because of that.
The next items up: knowledge, 
creativity and logic.
The foundations of human thought.
Given my audience, that makes a lot of sense.
At number 5: hugs.
Which Wikidata clinically describes as  
"a form of endearment, 
universal in human communities".
Granted, it's 2020 as 
this video goes out,
so they're less universal than 
they perhaps should be right now,
but that's still lovely.
Then we get to three items that I 
honestly wasn't expecting to be so high.
At number 4: gravity.
Sure, it's essential for 
the entire universe to work,
I just didn't expect it to beat 
"hugs". And then, at number 3...
...the Earth's magnetic field.
Like I said, extremely-online nerds.
Because, again, yes, 
essential for life to exist,
but just to be clear, "air" and "fresh 
water" only just made the top 25,
and somehow the Earth's 
magnetic field is at number 3.
And it's at this point that I really 
start to doubt my own methodology.
Because at number two is electricity.
I do realise that using an 
electronic device to run this poll
does give that a certain 
advantage, but again,
should that really be higher than air?
Before we get to the best thing, though,
here are some other interesting 
results in specific categories:
the best part of the body is the brain.
"Space" and "time" both fought and won 
exactly the same number of match-ups,
they landed in joint 36th place.
Despite there being quite a few 
things about sex in the list,
none of them got near the top 50.
"Okay, okay, I should have checked more 
than the top 50 before recording this,
"'cos it turns out that the 
highest-rated sex thing is 'orgasm',
"and it got to number 69, and I 
swear I'm not making that up."
The best creatures are bees, then 
emperor penguins, then hedgehogs.
The best colours are black, then 
blue, and the worst is brown.
Love doesn't even make it into 
the top 100, it's down at 137,
next to Vitamin C and cryptography,
and if that doesn't prove my audience 
isn't representative of the wider world,
I don't know what does.
Actually, I do know what does,  
heterosexuality lost more 
than 50% of its match-ups,
while bisexuality was ranked 
only one item below doctors.
Yes, it is ridiculous to try 
and rank everything like this.
But the results do reveal things 
about this group of people,
about the folks who tend 
to watch videos like this.
And perhaps the most revealing 
thing is what placed first.
It doesn't just tell you about the 
needs and desires of this audience,
it's also something about 
the times we're living in.
If we weren't in what seems 
to be such a rough year,
if I were giving this talk to a live 
audience, like I originally planned to,
instead of a standing in 
front of a green screen and
talking to a camera in a tiny apartment,
well, then, in that case maybe the 
results would have been different.
But the best thing, according 
to this audience in mid-2020:
the best thing is...
sleep.
Have a good night, folks.
I ran the polling site for 
this video on Fasthosts,
a web hosting company with more 
than twenty years' experience.
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All of their servers and 
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And if you are too, then you can go the 
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to enter their competition to win 
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worth up to £5,000.
If you can answer the techie test 
question they asked me to write.
Which is: what's the HTTP 
response code for 'OK'?
Terms and conditions 
are over on their site,
the closing date is 31st 
October 2020: good luck!
