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Power Laws, Weblogs, and Your Given Name
gummint writes "After contemplating the blogsphere and pondering whether "diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality", consider an old-media domain name: the one your parents gave you. How did they choose it? How many other persons have the same one? Get some facts, or a lot of facts. Or just comment anyway. The good news is that the extent of inequality can change massively over time: the popularity of the most popular given names has decreased dramatically since the Industrial Revolution."
Sort by decade or year of birth. Pretty interesting, imo. It's fun to watch which names stay on the top 10 for decades in a row and which were popular at one point and then declined dramatically.
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Many countries have laws to prevent this sort of thing. Im not sure about the U.S., but Germany requires that someone be named with an "appropriate" name, and in the case of dual nationality, they should have a name appropriate in both countries. A recent example was when a Turkish couple wanted to name their child Osama, but that was not allowed.
Previously in Belgium, you had to use a name from an approved list, which means that if you were dual nationality Belgium/Spanish, Miguel would become Michell, or Santiago may become James.. (Im not positive what santiago would become, its just an example)....
but anyway, in many places, I dont think you can actually change your name to: qwrtpsdfghjklñzxcvbnm....
But then Cher has done well.. I should change mine to "Z", just like MIB...
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Boromir wrote: I know my own heritage is crucial in my self identity, and I would never give it up, not for all the wealth in the land.
Keep in mind that you and your family are only the stewards of Gondor.
As someone who works with a record set of 100,000 thousand names, you would be amazed how far a middle name can go to distinguish you from other Stephen Williams. It would at least keep you from getting a username like "sw38947"
I think the point is that personal names follow "power law" distributions - IE. despite lots of freedom of choice in names, popularity still tends to clump towards a very select few. For example: look at the popularity of names like John or William, consistently in the top 10 over the last 100 years. I haven't looked at the female names as closely but they seem to be more prone to variance. Perhaps it's a result of a greater tendency of males to be named after an ancestor, whereas female names seem to follow "fashion trends".