Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Is this the best they can do?

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 23:18:20 GMT

The Weather Channel is going to start naming North American winter storms to help people keep track of them afterwards. The list for this coming winter starts with A for Athena, B for Brutus, C for Caesar—and runs aground at Q is for…Q. Which they helpfully gloss as the name of a New York City subway line.

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Looking at some name data

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:39:22 GMT

The New York City Health Department has released its list of most popular names for girls and boys in 2010. They break it down by ethnicity. The official categories here are Hispanic, Black, White, and Asian & Pacific Islander. My first thought was that the list doesn't look much like what I think of as "Hispanic" names: the only clearly Hispanic boys' name, Angel, is after Jayden and Justin and above Jacob and Christopher. Then I got to White.

For girls:

Esther

Olivia
Leah
Sophia
Emma
Rachel
Isabella
Sarah
Chana
Ava/Chaya

And for boys:

Joseph
David
Jacob
Michael
Daniel
Moshe
Benjamin
Matthew
Alexander
Jack/Samuel

The New York Times story that linked me to this talked about the frequency of Blblical names, and boys' names starting in J, but that list doesn't just look "Biblical" to me, it looks Jewish. Esther, Leah, Rachel, Sarah, Chana, Chaya, not any form of Mary (nor is Maria on the list of names given to Hispanic girls). Either a very large fraction of the white children being born in this city right now are Jewish, or nobody's going to be able to tell a Jewish name from a non-Jewish one ten years from now. Some of both, I suspect: Leah and Hannah have been pretty high in the national lists of girls' names in the last few years. Not Ann(e) or Anna, Hannah. (I was going to offer my grandparents' names to a friend who was looking for suggestions of what to name a baby, a few years ago, but my friend's "nothing in the top ten" request ruled out my grandmother's name; she was Mia, short for Amelia.)

At my job, we are sometimes asked to write practice questions in the form "$name is doing an experiment/has discovered" rather than talking about "a student" or "a scientist" or "a team." We try to come up with a mix of plausible names, of various ethnicities. What does "Hispanic name" mean when the list of names for Hispanic girls starts "Isabella, Mia, Emily, Sophia, Ashley"? (I tend to use are statewide data, for the year and state in question: the Social Security Administration is happy to give out, say, top ten names for girls born in West Virginia in 2002, or boys in Mississippi in 1993, or anything back about a century, though they note that the data are spotty pre-1937, which isn't a problem for our purposes. Having the list rather than pulling things out of the air at least means it's less likely to read like "these are old people" to the kids using the book, which it might if I started thinking of my friends.)

I don't know what, if anything, this means,

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Feeling discombobulated

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 20:39:28 GMT

OK. I have not in fact missed my deadline for today, because the deadline is 4 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, not Eastern. (Having thought I might have, I dashed off the most minimal of cover letters and attached the file.) Still, better that than making the error in the other direction.

It felt like a long week somehow; various things didn't quite go right, so a couple of different small problems at the gym yesterday felt like a big deal. But I pulled myself together, did a little walking on a treadmill and then got a cardio bike, and got more settled. I hadn't even realized how many different things there had been until I was talking to Emilie and she put it that way. (One of them was that I'd changed my time to see her to Friday in order to do something else on Thursday, which then fell through.) But I still think the gym needs more cardio bikes; they're down to four, two of which were out of order yesterday, and only one of them labeled as such.

I felt like I was running a bit late after the workout, so changed quickly, got downstairs, and saw a very intense thunderstorm. I didn't walk out into the storm, because the hotel exit I normally use leads into a covered arcade/driveway/road that connects 48th and 49th Streets, but I walked toward the street before I realized that I didn't want to go out into that: heavy rain, winds driving it at an angle, and frequent nearby lightning and thunder. I called cattitude to let him know that I wasn't going anywhere for a little while; I saw Emilie calling her husband to say much the same, and then we talked for 15 or 20 minutes until the rain eased enough that I was willing to walk to the nearest subway station. (I had an umbrella. That's okay for rain; not for lightning.) Cattitude, at home several miles away, was looking at a similar storm. When we went for a walk in the park today, there was a lot of mud, and deeper puddles than usual.

I was wearing a Bronx Zoo shirt, with otters on it; I think it was the members' freebie a few years ago. The organization that runs the zoo is now identifying itself as the "Wildlife Conservation Society," which is what it says on the shirt [1]. As I was heading home, some people looked at us and one of them said something like "Wildlife conservation, you're probably a good person to tell us what we want to know" and then asked some questions about the park. I handed them off to Cattitude, who has a better sense of direction, and he suggested they go uphill and then west.

( workout details )

[1] Legally it's still the New York Zoological Society, but our old souvenir shirts don't say that, they say "Bronx Zoo."

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3w4dw: playing with a meme

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 23:44:30 GMT

There's a questions meme going around. Since a couple of my friends have answered this one, I'll join them:

"Why did you pick your journal name?"

I came by "redbird" back in the 1990s, when my friend Lucy was running a MOO and invited me to join. People were mostly using handles, and I needed one. I happened to glance at my left arm, noticed the tattoo, and "redbird" it was. After a while, Lucy was occasionally calling me "Red."

When I joined Livejournal, my given name was taken, and redbird was available, so I grabbed it. Then when I came over here (yes, I'm still at LJ as well) I wanted the continuity, though I also grabbed my initials as a username (in the Unix system tradition). I haven't used that account, but it's not as though we're running out of usernames.

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