UK viewers can enter  their competition to win

a tech bundle and dream PC  setup worth up to £5,000.

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.

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And if you are too, then you can go the  link on screen or in the description

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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!