Given this, let’s not estimate IQ
Fun!
Estimate all sorts of things. Including, oddly, how many states were in the US in the beginning of 2001. (I knew the exact answer for this one. And I was pretty damn close for the latitude of London and birth of Jesus Christ . . . not so much for the number of counties in England — how big is a county?)
As you can imagine, it’s UK-centric. That gives me an excuse for my score which was so poor I refuse to share it. But I always knew I sucked at estimating.
via Crooked Timber
August 28th, 2004 at 7:29 pm
Well, I only managed 38%, and I’ve got no excuse. There is no standard size for an English county (land coverage or population), by the way.
August 29th, 2004 at 12:52 am
I guess I imagine a county like one of the districts in Quebec — they have nothing to do with MPs/MNAs, I don’t even know what they’re used for. But we have 60-odd, and I know there are way more people in the UK than in Quebec, so the number struck me as amazingly low. What is the point of a county?
A good result seems to be low forties. I got a lower score than you did.
August 29th, 2004 at 4:23 am
That was not really a very helpful comment was it? My excuse is that I was about to go to bed and was half asleep (hey, maybe I’d have done better at the quiz if I’d been awake too…)
A few examples from the 2001 census, anyway: Suffolk (East Anglia): 668553; Surrey (south east) 1059015; Lancashire (north west) 1134974; Cornwall (south west) 501267. The county (or shire) has been a key administrative unit for centuries (eg for purposes of tax-raising, parliamentary representation, law courts), although various ‘re-organisations’ over the last few decades have made things a lot more complicated than they used to be. County Councils (and the newer Unitary Authorities) are responsible for a wide range of services (eg Cheshire http://www.cheshire.gov.uk/). Elections are held every 4 years. I *think* parliamentary constituencies outside the big cities are still based around county boundaries, although I may be wrong on that; there are of course many more MPs than counties! (But county councils are still responsible for keeping electoral registers and sending out registration forms on a regular basis.)
A few links for the history:
http://jonathan.rawle.org/hyperpedia/counties/history.php
http://www.abcounties.co.uk/
http://www.camcity.co.uk/articles/Traditional_counties_of_England
By the way, the history is slightly different across Britain as a whole. I’m not quite sure when counties developed in Scotland (or Ireland), but they were imported to Wales by the English in two stages: in parts of the country following the Edwardian Conquest in the 1280s, and across the whole in the late 1530s.
So how do they compare to Canadian (and US) counties? I’m curious now!
August 29th, 2004 at 2:02 pm
Well, it turns out that what I called administrative regions are actually called counties in Quebec, sort of. They’re nto called counties in the north. Ontario (except in the north where the population is too sparse and the south where it’s too dense), NS, NB & PEI all have counties; none of the other provinces do. I think they’re used for census purposes, mostly; they seem to be otherwise fairly meaningless. Maybe for certain services?
No idea what they mean in the US.