Countable Nouns

I was struck with a problem this morning because my season ticket for the train expired. Do I purchase a new season ticket even though there are two bank holidays over the next seven days, or do I just buy daily tickets. I had to do some quick mental arithmetic at the ticket booth. In fact it wasn't difficult. Daily tickets cost £13 each way for the 15 minute journey, making it about the same price as hiring a private jet. A weekly season ticket is £52 and will cover three journeys, making it just mildly extortionate.

I would normally have purchased a ticket last night on the way home, but due to the fact that I left my bank card at the petrol station on Saturday, I had to do it this morning. Last week I tried to buy a weekly season ticket on Friday to start on the following Tuesday, because I was working from home on Monday. I couldn't do it however, because their system won't let me buy a season ticket starting on a Tuesday until after 12 pm on Monday. I find this astounding. First Great Western must have actually paid some developer to add that function to the system. I could understand it if it was a bug, but they actually paid to add a function that serves no purpose other than to piss passengers off and make them late.

A survey on the religious habits of the British people has been conducted by Tearfund. One should always be wary I think of any survey conducted by an organisation with an obvious bias, and Tearfund is a Christian organisation. Nonetheless, I'm interested in such things and I downloaded a copy of the report. The report throws out a plethora of statistics including:

53% of Britain is Christian
15% of UK adults attend a church monthly
22% of Londoners are regular church goers

I find some of these figures difficult to believe, but they apparently have data to back up their claims. So I thought I'd flick through their report and see if I could find out anything about the survey they conducted. And there it was, tucked away in the small print in Appendix 2:

After coding and editing the data, weighting was applied to correct for any minor imbalances in the achieved sample profile. The weighting matrix incorporated sex, age, social grade, and region. Cross tabulations were produced for each question against key demographic variables. These data remain confidential to Tearfund.

In other words, they tampered with the data and they aren't telling us how. I suppose we should be grateful that they do at least give us enough information to assure us that the figures are meaningless. Incidentally, what is this new fashion for for treating "data" as a countable noun? "Data" is like "Water", it's uncountable. You can't say "these water", it has to be "this water". Likeweise, you can't have "a water", or "a data", because they are uncountable. I hate these jumped-up, pretentious little shits messing with my language.

They do say on the report that the survey questions are available on request, so I may try and get hold of a copy.