What’s in a name? Children of the Collective Consciousness.

You may have unwittingly named your child after a meme in the fabric of society.  Or you yourself may be nothing more than the product of hive minded parents.

So what’s in a name?

I have always been interested in naming things, it’s one of the reasons why I own so many unused domain names.  And the naming of ones child is most likely the most important act of naming a person will encounter, so it always peaks my interest to find out why a particular name hold true to a set of parents.

After coming across a very cool set of visualization tools from Nametrends.net which pulls data sets the Social Securtity Administration, my curiosity got the best of me.  Particularly because my wife and I only last year named our son, Forest.

The data shows that the name Forest is not popular at all, about 1 in 10,000, however the double ‘r’ variant, Forrest, is 10 times as common.  Interestingly enough, both variants had a noticeable peak in the last 80 years, 1994.  The same year Forrest Gump debuted and won 6 Oscars.  Surely a correlation.  We passed on the second ‘r’ in Forrest for precisely this reason, in case our son Forest is ridiculed by future bullies (think “run Forrest run!), he can at least he can get off on a technicality.

But with such a well presented set of data (love the sparklines!), I had to go further and there were many surprises as well as mysteries.  Did you know that ‘Isabella’ was the second most popular name for girls last year?  Or than for boys, Logan is more popular than John, Jack, or Robert?  Or than since 1987, more boys have been named ‘Angel’ than girls.  There are more baby boys named Angel last year than Kevin or Justin.  Good thing we didn’t consult baby name books, or else we could have ended up with an Angel too, the #1 name for boys in Arizona, #2 in Nevada, #3 in California, #5 in Texas.  In 18 years time there will be an army of Angels register to vote in the Southwest.  Politicians and marketers take note.

But for me, the real mystery is why have there been such surges in the frequency of certain names.  ‘Angel’ has been around for over a century and on the rise since the early 1990’s, perhaps coinciding with the popular CBS series, Touched by an Angel, although this doesn’t explain the rise in use of the name for boys while for girls it has fallen since 2001.

Some names have increased in frequency several thousand percent over the course of a decade, some as much as 50% in one year alone.  Below are some visuals that show the sudden concentration and expansion of a ‘vogue name’.  The darker the state, for greater frequency the name.

First lets look at my own name, Jesse.  My birth certificate says ‘Jess’ but the sans ‘e’ variant hasn’t been in vogue for over a hundred years, so I used the more common ‘Jesse’.

Jesse

As you can see, my namesake is popular during the 70’s and 80’s and then seems to fall out of favor in the past decade.  I’m not sure why.  Perhaps a lack of Jesse role models or famous Jesse’s in general.  The peak for my namesake was in 1981.  Perhaps it was because former Minnesota governor and then wrestler Jesse Ventura won the World Tag Team Championship a year prior.  That is a bit of a stretch, but the previous peak was a hundred years prior in 1882, the same year Jesse James was assassinated by the coward Robert Ford.  Am I off base in making the connection?

Ok, over to more modern namesakes.  The girls name ‘Ava’.  You may know a few, its the fourth most popular name last year and up 4,441% in the past decade.  Ava has always hovered in the 1 in 5,000 range but recently it’s almost 1 in 100.  As you can see below, its not even on the radar until the explosion in the past few years.

Ava

With no notable Avas to speak of, I cannot explain the rise in this collective mind set.  Anyone care to offer en explanation?

Other name explosions are easier to correlate.  The name ‘Naveah’ which is ‘Heaven’ backwards did not exist before 2000.  It was then that P.O.D singer Sonny Sandoval gave the moniker to his daughter who was featured on the show MTV Cribs.  Like some ticking time bomb of the zeitgeist, Naveah rocketed up the list to #31 on last years’ most popular name for girls, above Julia, Jessica, and Katherine.  Bear witness to the power of a Christian metal rockstar’s power to influence 1 out of every 300 parents in the US.

Nevaeh

It doesn’t take a clever backwordification to create a naming sensation however.  Here are two more names with no cultural origin that have really come out of nowhere.

Aiden for boys.

And Addison for girls.

They rank 31 and 11 respectively on last years list.  Addison did not exist as a girls name before 1994, even though the male version has been around for a century.  Sudden rises like these baffle me, anyone care to take a shot at their origins?

If a some babies name are indeed fads then it would stand to believe that they would fall out of favor rather quickly.  One good example is the name Brittany.  In 1979 you had a 2,178 chance of being born a Brittany.  Ten years later and every 50th girl was a Brittany.  Now we are back to 1979 levels.  Did the saturation of Brittany’s reach such concentrated levels in 1979 that the peoples inner iconoclasm unleash backlash of better judgment?  See for your self.

Brittany.

It’s also interesting to note that the single ‘t’ variant, Britany, is much less common, in fact it’s barely on the radar, despite Ms Spears best efforts.

If most of the recent extremely popular names can’t be traced back to popular figures then what causes their rise?  Perhaps I am mistaken in thinking that famous people are even a factor.  Maybe there is some underlying driving force that germinates a particular name in the heads of parents, and the correlation with celebrities is only a coincidence.  I would love to hear some alternate theories.

But first let me present the ‘Dwight’ case.  It’s hardly a popular name these days, and even it’s glory days it was never more than 1 in 1,000.  Yet there are definitive peaks.  So I took the most famous Dwight of our era, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and matched up his popularity with that his name.  You can be the judge on whether there is a true correlation or not.

Now one final case is that of ‘Billy’.  I tried to think of a southern name to see if there were names prevalent in only certain parts of the country.  I knew this was the case but all the names in the top 100 each year are spread through the country.  At one point, back in 1934, 1 in 100 kids were Billy, not Bill or William, but Billy.  As you can see below, Billy rarely makes an appearance out side of the Bible belt.

Billy

So there is a geographical correlation as well as a possible celebrity correlation, and some overlap as well.  But what else is there?  What effects the minds of parents, practically simulataneously, creating a two-fold increase in the frequency of some names in only a years time?  It’s interesting to ponder for sure.

p.s. Another interesting factoid is that since 1880 the greatest frequency of names is a tie between John and William, who in 1880 were both 1 in 12 of newborn population.  The current most Frequent is Jacob who numbers 1 in 90.  No doubt the further back we go, beyond 1880, the greater concentration but I have yet to find data for that.

I’m still looking though.

What’s in a name? Children of the Collective Consciousness. has 7 responses Add your thoughts.

Visualizing One Billion Dollars.

The Death and Taxes poster contains a lot of information and is great for putting federal spending in context.  However, the de-facto unit of measure is one billion dollars.  I realized that people often have a hard time grasping just what one billion dollars is.  So to provide further context to the poster, I am putting one billion dollars into perspective.

There have been other attempts around the web to imagine what a billion dollars might be, but they tend to obfuscate the problem further.  You can go here and learn that one billion credit cards weighs as much as 78 brachiosauruses or that one billion dollars in pennies would cover 14 square miles, but does that all really mean anything?

Let’s investigate what one billion dollars is and how it relates to us and our world.

Now most people will never see $1 billion themselves.  If you live in the United States, there is a 1 in 800,000 chance that you’re a billionaire, which are about the same odds as winning half a million dollars playing Powerball.  So ingenuity, hard work, and inheritance will net you a better rate of return than the lottery, but for those of us without such gifts, one billion dollars is only attainable when working in groups.

If you have a PH.D. then you already have a leg up on everyone else.  Just gather together 278 of your doctorate friends and add up all the money all of you make during the 40 or so years of your career and presto!, One billion dollars.

Of course if you don’t have a PH.D and consider yourself just an ‘average’ guy, you will have to work a little harder, a little longer, or instead, just round up an additional 312 of your ‘average’ guy friends.

If you’re female you will need another 178 doses of girl power to reach one billion dollars over the course of your collective lifetimes.

If you consider yourself black or African-American you will need almost twice the man/woman power to reach a billion.  An additional 656 lifetime contributions will do the trick.

Of course if you are in the unfortunate position of living below the poverty line, it will take an entire regiment of your unfortunate brethren to come up with one billion dollars in a lifetime.

In reality, the federal budget is an annual process, so understanding a billion dollars in terms of lifetime incomes is only of moderate use.  To bring it down to the annual level, you are going to need a lot of friends.  This is assuming you and your friends represent the mean American.  That’s mathematical mean.  I’d imagine an unearthly level of charm is required to achieve this number of friends.

When relating to federal spending, we ultimately have to relate to taxes.  So here is the amount of people required to support one billion dollars in federal spending.    To put it another way, the taxes paid by everyone living in New York City is almost half of the annual cost of the war in Iraq.  You would have to tax everyone in L.A., Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Detroit to come up with the rest.  Again, this is assuming everyone in New York is an ‘average’ American, which is certainly not the case considering 40 of the aforementioned billionaires live there.  But you get the idea.

Before we get too far along on a socioeconomic tangent, lets switch gears.  If you happen to be so lucky as to win the Powerball lottery jackpot, odds being 1 in 146 million, then you are well on your way to being a billionaire.  Now all you have to do is win the jackpot every time for the whole year.  Impossible?  Surely not, why the odds are only 1 in 8 septendecillion.  That’s 55 digits.  If you are a string theorist, you might find those odds attractive.

Now that you are the luckiest person ever to live, what are you going to do with your winnings?  Blow it on something totally ridiculous of course.  That’s right, with your one billion dollar bank account you could purchase every action figure in sold in the US for a year.  Or all the video games for a few weeks.  I think we know that a year long reign as Lord of the Plastic Figurine to be the awesomer option.

Now forget that pipe dream! We are relating to government spending here and the gov’ment ain’t got time fer toys.  Instead of a nations’ worth of plastic superheros, one billion dollars can buy you half a plane.  Now, if we are talking strict off-the-line unit cost, then you could fly away in a B-2 with $250 million in cash stuffed in the weapons bay.  But you would first have to find someone to foot the R&D costs for you, which isn’t likely.  So $2.2 Billion is the total get-my-money’s-worth price for a B-2.  A bit out of reach for a lowly one billionaire.

The black market is where the action for the warlord on a budget.  Especially in Africa where a slightly used AK-47 will cost you 1/4 the price it would if it were bought in the Middle East; around $200.  One billion dollars could corner the entire black market for firearms.  You would need substantially more if you wanted to do it legally, providing the U.S. alone with $1.2 billion.  We are talking small arms here — machine guns, pistols, rifles, grenades, etc, which is only about 20% of the total international arms trade.  Even still, there is plenty of guns to go around, approximately one for every man, woman, and child in North America.  If you include military small arms, we will have to arm up South America as well.

Edit: I tried for about 45 minutes to think of a clever segue from fire arms to breakfast cereal but failed.  If you think of one let me know and I will credit you.

If you bought up all the stock you would enjoy the benefits of General Mill’s one billion dollars in profits.  That’s a lot of Boo Berry.  Yes, to further put the figure into perspective, this food giant, whose cereal you have grown up, with can put together one billion dollars worth of profit on $11 billion in sales.  This would place them somewhere around 200 on the Fortune 500 and 250 on the global Forbes 2000 lists.

Breakfast peddlers can’t hold a candle to the sheer monetary force of international war-making.  The entire yearly profit of a sprawling Fortune 500 company could be absorbed over a weekend in Iraq.  The war in Iraq is the first war in which we have had to borrow money from foreigners since that Revolutionary one we fought 225 years ago.  Back then the movies cost a nickle and a war was only $15 million.  Even adjusted for inflation and its not more than a week’s worth of Iraq’s expenses.  In fact, as you read this post, it’s costing $6,024 per second to wage war over there.

Two days in Iraq, annual income of 25 thousand people, a years worth of lotto winnings, its all one billion dollars.  I hope the preceding images have put that dollar amount into some perspective and that the information in the Death and Taxes poster is of a bit more use.  The National Cancer Institute receives $5 billion per year; that’s 10 days in Iraq, the cost of two and a half B-2’s, the tax revenue from half a million people,  every lotto jackpot for five years, etc.

To really understand federal spending, we need to put the information in to a larger context.  That is what the poster if for.  To relate federal spending to ourselves, we need to bring this large numbers down to eye level.  Hopefully, the next time you hear that the government spent ABC billion on XYZ you will think, “That’s a lot of action figures!”

Source: People. Guns. Toys. Lotto. Planes. War. Boo Berry.

Visualizing One Billion Dollars. has 11 responses Add your thoughts.