Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Nearly-Modern Superstitions
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2009 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Am I the only person who finds it especially auspicious when a person's first and last name combined count 8 or fewer letters, since then they could use it in an 8.3 DOS-style filename? (example: makohill.bat)
Comments
Brendan
http://www.xorph.com/
13 Apr 2009, 23:53 p.m.
Mel
http://blog.melchua.com
14 Apr 2009, 0:53 a.m.
I used to do that for 7 letters when I was a little kid (license plates).
Stuart
http://www.stuartsierra.com/
14 Apr 2009, 13:32 p.m.
Yes, you are.
Martin
14 Apr 2009, 17:48 p.m.
Better still if they have an eight-letter first name and three-letter last name. Also, it is hard to beat the name "Alphonse Lee". (He totally exists, too!)
Martin
14 Apr 2009, 18:02 p.m.
Okay, so I found some corpora and ran some regexes, and I found 846 eight-letter first names and 342 three-letter last names, which, if I'm not too tired to handle basic math, makes the number of possible 8.3 names 1.44 * 101001. Woo!
Good! Good. Now I have to count the letters in everyone's names forever.