Monday, March 07, 2011

Senseless

Yay, I've got my census form! Boo, census day is March 27th, the day before my last day at work. I'll have to describe myself as a financial analyst, not an unemployed memory-man-cum-vagabond.

I'm mystified by the government's advertising campaign claiming that the census will be used to determine local authority services. Surely this will just encourage everyone to lie on their form in the hope of making their local area seem most in need of a new swimming pool or whatever? Also, why haven't I had any spam emails/facebook messages urging me to put 'jedi knight' for my religion, or whatever? Or whatever.

Anyway, census forms were better 100 years ago. I can say this from genealogical experience.

4 comments:

Katy said...

Because this time round, they're asking people to put none, instead of Jedi, if they aren't religious. It doesn't lend itself quite so well to a jokey campaign like Jedi did, but is more likely to capture the people who think they ought to tick a religion because they are culturally affililated with it, or were baptised as a baby. See http://census-campaign.org.uk/ for details.

Tzvika said...

Hi ben i'm just learning and playing with a 4 level system and i have an idea on how to build one.i have been struggeling with creating a phonetic code that doesnt have so many mimi and kiki and similar sounds and is still quick. If you already have 1000 images (and i know you have 52*52=2704.

you will have 10 connection to each of the 1000 images you have(10*10K=10000) so for example
936 is a person and its buttercup from powerpuf then 1936 is someone connected to her like blosom and 2936 is connected to 1936 meaning blosom remineds you of I dont know what by that you can with some practice and mnemonics connect them with a link or something and it will not ruin you current phonetic code .
I know you know better than me about mnemonics so just wanted to hear your opinion

Zoomy said...

It's an interesting idea, and you score bonus points for using cartoon characters in your example. But I've tried category-themed systems before, and I feel that if I have to think "It starts with 1, so it's x, and then it goes 936, so it's y...", that takes longer to learn than reading it as 1-9-3-6-spells-"Buttercup". What I really want is a good way of turning a 4-digit number into a simple word...

Thanks very much for the suggestion! I really appreciate it!

Anonymous said...

It would be great if someone made an effort to win that thing that starts tomorrow.