04-25-2005, 12:21 PM
Hi,
Agreed. We had something similar last year, a "Our [Germany's] Greatest ..." series. The organizers compiled a list of 300 persons, then people had time to propose other names for the list, which had about 1300 names in the end. Over 90,000 votes were counted, and the resulting top 10 surprisingly didn't contain a single living person: Konrad Adenauer, Martin Luther, Karl Marx(!), Hans & Sophie Scholl, Willy Brandt, Johann Sebastion Bach, Goethe, Gutenberg, Bismarck, Einstein.
Too bad you Americans barely managed to get a list of only 100 nominees worthy of being called "America's Greatest". :P I'm curious to see the results, although in general I don't like this kind of non-representative polls.
-Kylearan
P.S.: Another installment of "The Greatest..." was about books, not restricted to German books this time. IIRC it had a lot more votes, and I was very pleased to see that The Lord of the Rings won, and that the Bible only came in second... :D
Nystul,Apr 25 2005, 12:27 PM Wrote:It's a strange list at face value, but it's not surprising if the list was compiled by asking each person to name the greatest American and tallying the results. If a single person made a list of 100, it would be quite different.
Agreed. We had something similar last year, a "Our [Germany's] Greatest ..." series. The organizers compiled a list of 300 persons, then people had time to propose other names for the list, which had about 1300 names in the end. Over 90,000 votes were counted, and the resulting top 10 surprisingly didn't contain a single living person: Konrad Adenauer, Martin Luther, Karl Marx(!), Hans & Sophie Scholl, Willy Brandt, Johann Sebastion Bach, Goethe, Gutenberg, Bismarck, Einstein.
Too bad you Americans barely managed to get a list of only 100 nominees worthy of being called "America's Greatest". :P I'm curious to see the results, although in general I don't like this kind of non-representative polls.
-Kylearan
P.S.: Another installment of "The Greatest..." was about books, not restricted to German books this time. IIRC it had a lot more votes, and I was very pleased to see that The Lord of the Rings won, and that the Bible only came in second... :D
There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better." - John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider