Naming your child via Excel

In an interesting blog asking readers to suggest ways they use excel that they think are geeky, here's one comment:

Excel helped me name our second child. The spreadsheet included both of our first and middle name preferences (prioritized), displayed all combinations so we could narrow the list down to a reasonable 10, and mixed and matched those finalists with our first child’s name, based on the following criteria:
- how the first and last name sounds like together (most common usage)
- how the first, middle and last name sounds (used when the bugger gets into trouble)
- what the initials are (with a name like Brian Samson, it’s obvious my parents didn’t think of this one)
- how the sound of the first name goes with our first son’s first name

Each of the above metrics had a score, a relative value of importance for each metric, and a response for each criterion from both her and I. Aggregating the sum-product of the relative values and the responses yielded a quantitatively accurate, preferred name from both her and my perspectives. A little fancy AI and the answer was magically displayed.

We looked at the screen, ignored the results and went with our guts. Who would name their child “#N/A #NAME? Samson” anyway?

Very funny.

posted by Blakey UK @ 3:09 pm