Some Blog Site

Regular readers of this blog will recall that every May I enhance the Social Security’s list of popular baby names during the previous year.

That should happen next week, pending release of the Social Security data.

What I have this week might be more interesting to most people that just a list of names. It is an animation of the growth (and decay) in popularity of the names.

I’m not putting the animations here on SomeBlogSite; rather, they are at SomeFunSite, with the rest of the baby name information. Go view the animations.

Here are some still images though:

This is how I made them:

First, I collected the top 25 names for each year from 1900-2012. Then I combined them into a list – the superset of top 25 names. For boys, this list was 103 names long. For girls, this list was 175 names long. Apparently girl names go in and out of fashion more quickly than boy names.

Next, I went through each year and got the number of babies born with those names, and put all that information into bubble charts.

Finally, I combined all 113 bubble charts into one animation file.

And then repeat the steps for the other gender.

How long did that take?
Not as long as it sounds. The longest part was figuring out the colors to use and the size of the text for the names and the pattern/placement of the circles.

Once that was in place, it’s easy. Thanks to PHP and SVG, it takes about 1 minute for that second step (generating 113 images). PHP also got the first step done in about 3 seconds (after I took about 15 minutes to write the script).

The last step is a little time consuming. I used GIMP to create the animated GIF. I had to drag and drop 113 files (one at a time) into the program. Maybe there’s a batch import function, maybe there’s a way to script it, but it wasn’t too bad by itself so I didn’t bother trying.

The funny things is that this project succumbed to the problem that the baby names site fixes for the Social Security list of names. That is, duplicate spellings of names are not combined. So the charts have both Aidan and Aiden, or Michaela and Makayla. I noticed this late enough in the process that I didn’t feel like redoing things.

Government has been telling us that we need to improve fuel economy by our actions – inflate our tires, buy electric vehicles, etc.

You’ll notice that anytime the government discusses fuel economy, it is always in the context of what other people or groups need to do; the government is never responsible.

I was thinking about that the other day as I sat in my car, idling at a red light and watching the green light’s empty lanes. Why did I have to sit there and waste gas? Because the government wants other people, not the government, to have to act to improve fuel economy.

More prevalent than solid-red left arrows though are the 4-way stops. What contributes not only to poor fuel economy but also to higher maintenance costs for a vehicle? Stop-and-go driving.

I bet the government could improve my fuel economy if it upgraded a bunch of intersections from 4-way stops to roundabouts. Then I wouldn’t have to stop. Coasting through a right turn, rather than coming to a complete stop and then having to accelerate again, would reduce my dependency on foreign oil.

And then are some T intersections where the right turn traffic has to come to a complete stop because the light is red, even though their action would not interfere with the green-light traffic.

Why not put up a right-turn green arrow (that would be on when the cross street has a green light) so that we don’t need to burn more gas than we need to?

Come on, government, do your part too.