Sometimes a picture paints not only a thousand words, but a thousand numbers as well. The very best graphs can tell a story.
I remember in my stage two Econometrics class, our Professor David Giles showing us a picture of a truly elegant graph, produced in the pre-computing days, showing Napoleon's advance into Russia, and retreat. From memory it captured the distance travelled, the size of the army and other variables on one sheet.
I found a new cool graph today, at Name Voyager courtesy of a link from the Freakonomics blog.
It's of a baby names graph of the 1000 most popular names in the US from the 1880s onward. You can type in a name, letter by letter, and it instantly graphs the letter combinations over time.
For example, my Mother's name, Judith, peaked hugely in the 40s - I wonder why? Was there a film star? The name means Jewish Woman, and at around the time the name peaked there was a lot of newspaper coverage about the fate of the Jews in Europe. Was there sympathy? Or just that the very sound was heard so much that it triggered an awareness and prompted more naming?
My own name, Rachel, hit a peak in the 70s and 80s. I was surprised to see that there wasn't a mini-bubble following the TV show Friends, but it seems that the name had passed on through by then.
Our shared second name, Mary, was the number one name from 1880s through to the 1950s, and moved into number 2 spot in the 60s before falling sharply away. What's most interesting though, was that in the 1880s more than 30000 names per million were Mary - or more than 3 percent of the total. By the 50s, it was still the most popular name, but now had only 1%, pointing to either a more Multi-cultural America, or an increasing pool of names (and spellings) in use.
Warning: name voyager can be addictive!
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