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Wednesday, October 25, 2006

How many?

Kerron Cross has discovered from this site that there are no people with the same name as him in the United States of America.

It seems that out of 299,968,595 adults in the USA, 361 of them are named Peter Black. The site's list of famous people with my surname includes Jack Black, Karen Black and Sirius Black. Funny that, I thought Sirius Black was a fictional character in Harry Potter.

Just for the record the site states that there is nobody called Rhodri Morgan in the USA, largely because it says that his christian name is unknown over there. Maybe that will change after the next Ryder Cup in Kentucky.
Comments:
There are only 153 of me.

My younger nephew only has 7 sharing his name. I'm surprised it was that high.
 
There are 46 of me, apparently, as long you use my full forename. There are 0 people in the US with my middle name as their first...
 
Hmm. It says that there is no-one in the US with my surname, but googling for relatives in the past I've found quite a few, including two different people with both my first name and surname. So maybe it's just protecting the privacy of the handful of Rhodris in the US.
 
YourNotMe.com got there first I feel.

My surname also registers as unknown, they only bother with relatively common names.

YourNotMe.com says there are 3 of me in the UK, but I'd bet that given they use the electoral roll, I may have been registered in more than one place at the time.
 
Jeeez I'm sick to death of seeing this on every blog I visit and people talking the same nonesense.

It's not a database of individual's names, it calculates *probability*.

From the site:
"While both names you entered were found in our database, neither was common enough to make it likely that someone in the U.S. has that name."

"The list of names from the census bureau isn't complete. For privacy reasons, names with relatively few responses were not included in the list. We used this data to create this site. Our site can only be as good as the data we have to work with."

"* Around 1 out of every 10 people will have a last name not on the list.

* Around 1 out of every 10 people will have a first name not on the list."

"Using the same statistical fallacy this site is known for, that means about 81% of people will have both names on the list. In a mathamatical coup our scientists have determined from this information that about 19% of people will have either one or both names missing from the list."
 
You are such a wet blanket Will! :-)
 
Yes. I'm self-aware enough to have worked that out as well ;)
 
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