Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

The Baby Name Wizard: NameVoyager

The Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager is an interactive portrait of America’s name choices. Start with a “sea” of nearly 5000 names. Type a letter, and you’ll zoom in to focus on how that initial has been used over the past century. Then type a few more letters, or a name. Each stripe is a timeline of one name, its width reflecting the name’s changing popularity. If a name intrigues you, click on its stripe for a closer look.

This is pretty interesting, but I notice that the graph is really strange for Joshua. It rises from about 0 in 1960’s, when I was born, to a peak in the ’90s, and a fairly sharp decline to 2003. That made me suspicious, since I know that the 2004 Social Security website shows Joshua as #1 (I blogged about it before). It turns out that if you hover over the decade, you get a pop-up box showing the actual ranking. The 2003 rank is 3. That peak you see there? That’s 1990’s Rank of 4. So the big downward trend in the graph seems to be simply incorrect, it should be almost imperceptibly higher than level. I don’t know how to explain it, other than a coding error in the applet.

Hat tip Marginal Revolution

Just upgraded to a new version of WordPress, mostly to try some new anti-spam plugins. Let me know if you see anything wonky (the broken link in the previous entry seems to be Amazon’s fault, not that of WordPress–at least the same link that used to work shows up with the Not Found message even if I put it in a wiki page instead of this blog).