Phys .org: Database stores names for family members in 1,200+ languages. “Fiona Jordan, professor of anthropology from the University of Bristol, has been working with colleagues from Australia, Finland, and Brazil to develop KinBank—a catalog of more than 1,200 languages and their words for family members—known as kinship terminology. It features more than 210,000 kinship terms ranging from cousins to great-grandparents.”
Mashable: The secret Wikipedia prank behind the Pringles mascot’s first name. “The name ‘Julius Pringles’ — which Kellogg’s claims as officially trademarked, though a search of the United States Patent and Trademark Office site for ‘Julius Pringles’ returned no immediate results — looks not to have come from a marketing team, or some long-forgotten Pringles founder. Rather, the name stems from two Wikipedia savvy, hoax-loving college students snacking away on Sour Cream & Onion Pringles in their dorm room back in 2006.”
Space: Your name can fly around the moon on NASA’s Artemis 1 mission. “NASA is inviting people to put their names on a flash drive that will launch on the agency’s Artemis 1 mission, which will send an uncrewed Orion capsule around the moon and back a few months from now.”
Washington Post: Meet the Kovids. These people share the same name as the covid-19 pandemic.. “The pandemic has fundamentally changed the lives of the people who share the Sanskrit name of Kovid. And many of the Kovids are tired of the jokes. Several have even bonded over social media, forming a loose network to discuss and complain about their shared experiences of being mocked for a name that means ‘scholar or learned person’ — and is referenced in Vedic literature, including within a Hindu prayer dedicated to Lord Hanuman — yet takes on a whole new meaning in the covid pandemic.”
New York Times: Her Instagram Handle Was ‘Metaverse.’ Last Month, It Vanished.. “Five days after Facebook changed its name to Meta, an Australian artist found herself blocked, with seemingly no recourse, from an account documenting nearly a decade of her life and work.”
Washington Post: Amazon, can we have our name back?. “Alexa Morales wore her name proudly. But after Amazon launched its voice service, also called Alexa, in November 2014, people began speaking to Morales differently. She said they made jokes about her name, giving her commands or asking her questions in a robotic tone.”
WJTS: The Indiana State Archives Launches the Research Indiana Indexes. “The expanded Indiana Digital Archives has a new home! Now called the Research Indiana Indexes, the site includes over 1.36 million names and entries … The site allows users to search the names of Hoosiers indexed in the Indiana State Archives’ historic collection, spanning more than two hundred years.”
AdAge: Delta Air Lines Sent A Care Package To Cheer Up A Little Girl Named Delta. “The relationship began last week when [Delta’s mother] Kellie tweeted her annoyance at the term ‘Delta Plus’ for the new COVID variant. She wrote: ‘Petition not to call it “Delta Plus” and instead move on to the next letter in this cursed variant alphabet. Sincerely, the mother of a very sweet little Delta who once thought the airline would be the most annoying namesake joke.’”
Protocol: Want to succeed on GitHub? Your odds are better if you’re white. . “Software developers with white-sounding names may have more success on GitHub than developers whose names are perceived as Black, Hispanic or Asian-Pacific Islander, according to a recently published study.”
Fermilab: Scientific publishing organizations and national laboratories partner on transgender-inclusive name-change process for published papers. “All 17 U.S. national laboratories and many prominent publishers, journals and other organizations in scientific publishing announced today the beginning of a partnership to support name change requests from researchers on past published papers. Previously, individual researchers shouldered the burden, administratively and emotionally, of initiating name-change requests with each publisher of their past papers…. This partnership streamlines these previously ad hoc processes and offers an official validation mechanism to all involved by enabling researchers to ask their respective institutions to pursue name changes on their behalf directly with the publishers and journals.”
Mashable: Insect scientists want your help renaming bugs with racist names. “The [Entomological Society of America]’s Better Common Names Project is just what it sounds like: An effort to root out any examples of problematic names on the ESA Common Names of Insects and Related Organisms List. The effort starts with a task force that will be looking at: names containing ‘derogative terms,’ names for invasive bugs that include ‘inappropriate geographic references,’ and names ‘that inappropriately disregard what the insect might be called by native communities.’”
Engadget: iCloud allegedly locked out a user over her last name. “iCloud has had the occasional service issue, but its latest problem appears to be highly… specific. Actor and author Rachel True claims iCloud has effectively locked her out of her account due to the way her last name was written. Reportedly, her Mac thought lower-case ‘true’ was a Boolean (true or false) flag, leading the iCloud software on the computer to seize up. The problem has persisted for over six months, she said.”
The Register: Social media notifications of the future: Ranger tagged you in a photo with Tessadora, Wrenlow, Faelina and Graylen. “Choosing a name for one’s offspring can be incredibly difficult. You don’t want them to be the ninth Jaxon in class, but you also don’t want them to be bullied mercilessly for the rest of their lives. Even so, parents are increasingly pulling appellations out of their arses, in some cases to give their child a ‘unique’ identity on social media.”
For a given value of useful, but I thought it was neat. Also, apparently my name is visually boring. Boing Boing: Online generator answers “What color is your name?”. “‘What Color is Your Name?’ is a website that associates your name, or any name, with blocks of colors.” The creator of the site has Grapheme–color synesthesia.
Boing Boing: Very fun algorithm guesses your name with surprising accuracy. “Nathan Yau created this fun and fascinating name guessing algorithm. You select ‘male’ or ‘female,’ the decade you were born, and then type in the first letter of your name. “
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