Totally useless trivia "discovered" by a Tcl script

Ken Jennings (of Jeopardy! fame) posed the following research invitation on his blog yesterday:

Anyway. The cover of Bradbury Stories is as shown [at right], with BRADBURY in navy blue and the letters within BRADBURY that spell RAY in white. I thought this was pretty cool and wondered: are there other famous people who first name is contained, in order though not necessarily consecutively, within their last?

Ray makes it looks so effortless that youd think there would be lots of others, but I spent about half an hour trying to name some and could only come up with one: sportscaster Al MichAeLs. I tried to interest the assembled Grand Slam brain trust into thinking of others, but evidently even the Sony greenroom provided too much stimulus for a dull pursuit like this one.

But hey, this is the Internet. Theres got to be lots of bored people out there. Can anybody think of other kangaroo celebrities like bRAdburY and michAeLs?

I doubt I could name ten five sportscasters at all from memory. I'm not at all up to date on popular culture. (Although Jeopardy! is an enjoyable show, I rarely watch TV and never saw Ken play during his famous winning streak; for what it is worth probably the main thing we have in common is religion.) So basically, I have to resort to programatic analysis of existing data rather than my own wealth of trivia knowledge re: celebrities, etc.

My first apprach was to turn to Project Gutenberg as a source for a list of (mildly) famous authors. Naturally these authors are all dead since nothing published since Steamboat Willy was produced in 1928 has been allowed entered the public domain (nor, I fear, will it ever—at least in my lifetime—but I digress...)

I spidered their index of authors. I chose to discard any name where the given name was spelled by consecutive letters in the surname (think William Williams or Eino Leino) as being too uninteresting.

I only came up with three answers:

1. Asa Don DICKINSON
2. Archibald Lee FLETCHER
3. Helvi HERLEVI

As an alternate approach I decided to find U.S. government lists of names that I could put together & run some regular expressions over.

For surnames I ended up using a list of surnames ranked by frequency from the Census Bureau (incidentally Cleverly clocks in at 86,655th out of their 88,799 listed surnames).

For given names I chose the 1,000 most popular names in the 2000's for both boys and girls (2,000 names total based on Social Security card applications).

In total we have 88,799 unique surnames and 1,935 unique given names (65 unisex names are on both lists). Incidentally, did you know that "Baby" is the 831st most popular boy name and 989th most popular girl name? I sure didn't.

(But maybe if I'd been born a Babey, Bagby, Bagsby, Banbury, Baraby, Barby, Barnaby, Barnebey, Battersby, Blackaby, Blackerby, Braboy, Brackenbury, Bradberry, Bradbury, Bradby, Brasby, or Brayboy instead of a Cleverly I would have?)

Taking the cartesian product of these two sets gives us 171,826,065 name combinations to consider. How many "interesting" combinations exist? 65,733 or 1 out of every ~2,614 combinations. That's too many to list in the body of this post (but you can download them).

What surnames have the most flexibility in mixing and matching with a given name to produce an interesting result? The top five are:

BHAMARANIYAMA

28 possible given names: Amani, Amara, Amari, Amaya, Amiya, Amy, Amya, Ana, Aniya, Anya, Ari, Aria, Bria, Hana, Maia, Mara, Maria, Mariam, Mary, Maryam, Maya, Mia, Miya, Mya, Nia, Nya, Ray, & Riya.

JOSEPHPAULINE

24 possible given names: Ali, Ean, Eli, Halie, Jan, Jane, Jean, Joan, Joe, Joel, Johan, John, Jolie, Jon, Josephine, Josh, Josie, Josue, Julie, Paul, Saul, Sean, Shane, & Shaun.

SANTAMARINA

24 possible given names: Amara, Amari, Amina, Ana, Ann, Anna, Ari, Aria, Maia, Mara, Maria, Mia, Mina, Nia, Nina, Sam, Samara, Sanaa, Sara, Tamara, Tamia, Tara, Tia, & Tina.

CHAMBERLIAN

22 possible given names: Abel, Alan, Ali, Alia, Amelia, Ari, Aria, Ben, Bria, Brian, Cael, Cali, Cara, Carl, Carla, Carli, Celia, Ean, Eli, Elian, Erin, & Mia.

KANJIRATHINGA

22 possible given names: Ana, Anahi, Anita, Ann, Anna, Ari, Aria, Ian, Jan, Jana, Kai, Kaia, Kara, Karina, Kian, Kiana, Kira, Nia, Nina, Raina, Tia, & Tina.

Two thoughts: Girls seem to definitely have an edge over boys in this contest and I can't recall ever meeting someone with one of these surnames.

If we narrow our cartesian product down to the 10,000 most common U.S. surnames we end up with only 5,992 interesting pairs (out of 19,350,000 combinations). The top five surnames become:

1. Vanlandingham
2. Candelaria
3. Evangelista
4. Santamaria
5. Chamberlain

with nineteen, sixteen, sixteen, sixteen and fourteen respectively. How many of the given names can you find hidden within these surnames?

Restricting the search to the top-100 most popular surnames (only 52 interesting pairs) the winner is Richardson (boys win finally: Aron, Carson, Cason, Chad, Ian, & Ricardo).

For the record with Cleverly as your surname your only choice is Lee. (I'm not having any second thoughts about what we named our twins though!)

Anyway, with such popular given names maybe some of todays kids with those names will grow up to be famous celebrities in the future...? :-)

—Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 at 23:45

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