Just In Time

A month or so, after I began working, a contractor named Justin joined the company. He was there to help out his friend Joe do art work. Even though he had earned a computer science degree at Maryland, I had no idea who he was. Since then, he's moved on to Baltimore with his girlfriend, and listens to music, attends parties, takes photos, maintains his webpage, and decides what he wants to do with his life.

You think this is going to be a blog about Justin's life?

Nope. I don't know him that well. This is a blog about his name. Justin, to my mind, is an uncommon name. Yet, I knew another Justin, as well. I started to think, in my sample size of two, that the name Justin must be a new occurrence. I mean, it's not as if I hadn't heard the name before. It isn't like Mysheka, where I would wonder if it weren't made up by some hip African American woman, or more accurately, discovered.

Yet, how many Justins do I know, even famous ones? The most famous is very famous. That's Justin Timberlake. He was formerly a member of the boy band, N'Sync. He's since gone solo. Britney claims he deflowered her (no, I mean, for the first time).

Justin Timberlake is also famous for singing a duo with Janet Jackson. Janet Jackson, who sang, "What Have You Done for Me Lately?". Apparently, Mr. Timberlake had ripped clothing off of Ms. Janet. That's what he had done for her lately. This revealed a metallic star covering up her bosom. Thus was born the phrase "wardrobe malfunction", and it entered the lexicon of sports commentators every where.

I suspect there are other Justins that I don't know about, yet, what these people all had in common was there relative youth. I asked the Justin who worked at the company about that, and he said he knew a few other Justins, but all were under the age of 30. I asked the other Justin I know, and he sent me to a website, showing how common the name Justin had become recently, after wallowing in obscurity for years.

The website is interesting. It plots baby names versus time in a real time applet. As you type the letters, it overlays many graphs. Each letter restricts the search more. If you type "J", then only names with that letter appear. Janes and Jameses and Josephs and, yes, Justins appear. As you type "Ju", it pretty much comes down to Justins (or June).

But here's the thing. Until the name becomes popular, you don't know it's popular. What was it, some twenty years ago, that caused a numerous number of mothers to start naming their sons "Justin"? This is the kind of mass communal decision making that must delight and confound sociologists.

Isaac Asimov wrote a series of books called the Foundation seies. Underlying the story is the idea of psychohistory which is to people what thermodynamics is large number of particles. Thermodynamics is the study of aggregate behavior of, say, gasses. While, in principle, you can model each and every of billions and billions of particles, and use Newton's laws to predict what the aggregate will do, this is in generally very computation-intensive.

Given that particles behave in a random fashion, but obey a few laws (hot goes to cold), then you can predict what the whole will do, even without accounting for the invidual behavior of each particle. And it works remarkably well.

Asimov thought this would be an interesting way to predict the actions of people. If you couldn't predict what individuals could do, you might be able to predict what billions and billions of individuals would do. And so was born psychohistory. Those knowledgeable could affect the course of history by tweaking societal parameters to lead to better societies and grand accomplishments.

Of course, Asimov was a science fiction writer, and there is no such science, but it's interesting to think about what the root causes that lead to the rising popularity of a baby name. I also find it curious that male names change more slowly than female names. Why is that? For example, Dave and Michael are popular male names. I have no doubt they will continue to remain popular for years to come. I can't even begin to tell you what popular American female names are now. For any female name, I can barely name three people with the same name. That may be because I know so few women, especially since the people I know are in computer science. Even so, I'm sure there's more variety in women's names than men's (alas, in Spanish speaking countries where Catholicism is big, the name Maria is extremely common).

Yet, despite male names being more static than female names, here come the Justins. How to explain the sudden rise of Justins? If there were a famous actor or figure, I might be able to say, ah, Justin So-and-so was so compelling that women were smitten by the name. I can't think of any famous Justins from twenty years ago. You could Justin Timberlake is famous, but really, at his age, it would only explain the next generation of Justins. He's part of the product of Justins that have come up in these past few years, not its cause. And what's the next new popular male name? Brandon?

What's in a name? What indeed.