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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."
My name is Robert Lee Claypool. I live in Muncie There is another Robert Lee Claypool in Anderson in the next county over.
As the popular films become more pervasive and as the movie industry becomes more proliferous and agressive with its idolization of superstar actors and actresses such as Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Rene Zellweger, etc, I wouldn't be surprised at all to find more and more people identifying their children with those names in mind.
Wanting a unique name has nothing to do with hating yourself. I do not define myself by my name, but others do. It is natural that after I become an adult I would want input into such a basic thing as the identifier by which people know me.
Changing my name does not change my heritage. No one's heritage is that flimsy. A different name doesn't change who my father or his father or his father's father was, or where they lived, or what traditions they practiced.
Fart.
I was having a little thought experiment going through these lists of names and such, and something dawned on me. It's fairly obvious from the data on these lists that men's names hang around a lot longer than women, and generally, it seems the top 10 was very stable in males (up until very recently, I had no idea Jacob was that popular...) while female names change top 10 at least once a generation. I was thnking why this happened, and when you think of female names, there are definitely "old" sounding names compared to males. No one thinks James or Robert sounds old, but Mildred and Ruth sound like older women's names. The one thing that came to me is that women "don't want to end up like their mother" while men look up to their father, even after he chops your hand off in a lightsaber battle. It seems like women's names gain a stigma of "old", and it's worse for a woman to be old than a man, so women name their daughter's newer, cuter names, where men respect their elders more (or something), so continue the line of Michael's and William's. Or I'm a sexist nutjob who should actually be working at work instead of reading /.
Th
Notice how these comments are getting horrible ratings? Well, it makes sense; they're almost all worthless.
Why? Well, what interesting/insightful/funny comment can be made on this subject, especially on slashdot?
This is a discussion forum with a general tradition of *avoiding* usage of given names. Right off the bat, this causes abortive comments like, "I have a really interesting name, kinda like this other name, but I'm not going to tell you what it is, because my boss might be googling me."
And what insight can a techie offer about given names? Yeah, some of us have the same name. Some don't. They serve a useful purpose, but not one really worth talking about.
I guess some names are sorta funny, and some naming stories are funny, but nothing that's going to make you wet your pants. I know of a guy whose parents wanted to give him an English name but didn't know any English themselves, so they grabbed a book for inspiration... and named him "Oxford University Press".
See? Ok, but who would moderate that up past a 2?
New discussion: how can we help our slashdot editors to select better discussion topics?
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
According to the Old Testament, God gave Adam the power to name the birds and the beasts -- thus giving Adam dominion over the natural world.
Similarly, in her "Earthsea Trilogy" series, Ursula K. LeGuin emphasizes that everything has a true name, and that this true name is what wizards use when conjuring.
In my own line of work, I've learned that good programming begins with good naming conventions.
Everything has a name -- even if it's nothing more than "Hey! You!"
-kgj
Do you *really* expect us to believe that you'd be the same person whether you were raised by Christians, Muslims, atheists, or animistic bushmen?
Your ideas of who you are depend massively upon such things, and it's just silly to pretend otherwise.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Popularity of the name Chelsea:
2001 156
2000 140
1999 123
1998 94
1997 73
1996 57
1995 48
1994 46
1993 25
1992 15
1991 19
1990 24
I guess parent-child reputation goes both ways.