My time to shine.
I was travelling through there with my family and my wife says she wants a picture of the Sandwich Police because, hey, why not. We figure the has to be cop cars at the police station, right? So we cruise by, she rolls down the window and takes a picture of their parking lot. So now we’re sitting there, looking at our GPS figuring out where to go next. Cue the flashing red and blue lights. Yup, one of the cops had pulled up behind us asking why we were taking pictures of a secure location. Fortunately we were able to explain and it turned into a humorous situation. The cop was surprisingly cool and let us take pictures of his cruiser. He joked that, “yes, we’re the Sandwich Police, we make sure a foot long is actually a foot long.”
He was part of a panel this weekend at the MIT Museum. It was interesting to hear how widespread this problem of poor record keeping is for births and deaths. Up until quite recently (like the 1960’s for the US), many places were, and some still are, terrible about it. That didn’t even include things like China’s former one child policy.
It’s not just a curiosity that some people don’t actually know how old they really are. It has real effects. When you’re trying to make health care or retirement benefit decisions for a whole country, having bad population data is a serious concern. Life insurance actuaries probably treat out their hair over this sort of issue, too