Every few months, I’m reminded that I really need to spend more time playing with Wolfram Alpha, because I have a gut feeling that it could be damned useful if I just figured out how to use it.

For example, consider this plot of three American first names:

As is made plainly visible, my buddy Adam got in on the ground floor in 1969, watching his market share soar until just before college, after which he lost ground but eventually took the lead over from Brian.

Brian, meanwhile, enjoyed a NASDAQ bubble during the Nixon and Ford administrations—which probably explains more than it should. Hopefully he unloaded his shares before Carter came along, but no Republican since has bother reversing his slide.

And as for me: pretty much instantaneously after I was able to pronounce my own name, Jeff plummeted off a cliff, and is apparently headed for an obscurity in the 21st century which will make teenagers look at me in my senescence as if I said, “Greetings, my name is Osgood Pfarthingworth.”

As for last names, neither Porten nor Sherr makes the cut, but Wolfram tells me that 0.64% of Greenbergs are Asian. Unfortunately, it can’t tell me how many of them are Jewish.

Here’s the Stephen Wolfram video which led me back to Alpha. I’ll have more to say afterwards, but as that post is going way off the rails in terms of content, I’ll save it for later.