Causes of death

[davidn]

When I have to write something to spit out reams of dummy patient data and the schema includes fields like "cause of death", you can bet that I'm going to write a generator that lightens its mood a bit. Although I imagine they might want to hand it to someone less mad before such a tool gets released to anyone else.

As they seem to be the leading cause of death among my surrealist population - watch out for refrigerators, particularly the ones that hide up trees.

Comments

[premchaia_pre4]

Oho. I thought the listing was supposed to be of distinct causes. I couldn't immediately divine the meaning of the other two columns; I thought the one on the left might have been some kind of frequency despite its name. :-)

[davidn]

The way it works with the real data is that... according to this medical data storage standard, each cause of death or medicine or condition has a unique ID that they're classified into (a bit like the Dewey classification system), and that first column holds the category while the text column has the actual original entered value. For my test data, I just threw in some random numbers - matching the IDs doesn't matter to me here.