Baby names and Maps

Becky sent me an e-mail yesterday with the title "I'm almost afraid to tell you about this." Apparently she knows me too well.

Since childhood I've loved baby names. I loved going through books of names and coming up with names and personalities for enormous imaginary families. The families had chore schedules and pets (with names!) and all kinds of details. But mostly, names. For years I've talked to Becky about baby names and she has refused to participate, being one of those women who has not had her future children named for decades. Now that we're finally engaged, a few months ago, she finally let me have one conversation in which she entertained the idea of naming children something other than Rainbow Cloudforest and Cookiedough Christmastree. So yes, I love baby names.

I also have a long standing love of maps showing regional differences. For example, here is a really awesome one of the great pop vs. soda debate. Seriously, I could stare at that thing for hours. I love election returns maps for similar reasons. This cool one shows changes over time and this awesome one shows the 2004 presidential election results by county and population size. And here is an absolutely amazing collection of regional American dialect maps. So, if I haven't convinced you I'm a nerd yet...

You can imagine my excitement when Becky sent this my way. How cool is that? I wish there was some way names could be shown in colors on a map, but this is still awesome. Enjoy.