I was wrong. Personal records are indicative of general skill. This will be easier to understand if you look at the graph I made.
What I should have said: To assess general skill you have to look at more than just personal records. Looking at a histogram (like this one from my 7b endurance practice today
) to see the distribution of the number of catches per run is more helpful than looking at the best run of the day.
For example: Looking at the graph above, the best run of the day was 184 catches*, but 17 (out of 36) runs only lasted between 9 and 26 catches. A better juggler may have a best run of <100 catches, but a lot more runs from 60 to 70 catches, giving them a higher average than me.
*I used matplotlib in Python to make that graph using the code plt.plot(plt.hist(runs, bins=10)[0]). From the graph the best run does look like 175, but it was 184 in the data. There is only a single data point in the bin from 166 to 184 catches, and it falls on the extreme right side of the bin.
by Stephen Meschke, in response to this post 2015-12-05 04:25:51