Surprise Monday vlogbrothers video explains Olympic bronze medal phenomenon

It's not Friday, or Tuesday. But there's a new vlogbrothers video up on the YouTube channel -- and it's Hank Green attempting to uncover a mystery about the Olympics.

This video is in response to Hank's Friday video, in which he discussed uncovering a "mystery" about the Olympics -- particularly about ranking countries by gold medals in the Olympic Games.

The original video questions specifically why Europe, as a whole, won more bronze medals than the United States. Continental Europe, over the past 20 years of Olympic Games, has consistently won more bronze medals. Why?

In today's surprise video (usually only two vlogbrothers videos are released per week -- one by John Green every Tuesday and one by Hank every Friday. But this was important enough that Hank just had to make a follow-up video, today, on a Monday.

As you can see by the thumbnail, Hank didn't have as much luck proving some of his initial theories as he thought he might. Breaking out a good old-fashioned spreadsheet, he discovered that the higher number of bronze medals had nothing to do with affluence of countries or number of athletes competing per country.

In fact, the simple answer isn't even that in the Olympics, there are several events where more than one bronze medal is rewarded.

The real answer is ... math. You can look into more detail about the statistics as you watch Hank do the calculations in the video above, but it's not anything to do with the people competing at all. It's just numbers.

The majority of comments on the video actually applaud Hank for, between the two videos, presenting a hypothesis and then openly testing it and admitting he was wrong. Many have begged him to keep both videos up (for learning purposes?). Let's hope he does.