From:	Matthew Bond mgb@*****.swinternet.co.uk
Subject:	Name Generators
Date:	Thu, 19 Oct 2000 08:00:33 +0100

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rand Ratinac" <docwagon101@*****.com>
To: <shadowrn@*********.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2000 3:21 AM
Subject: Re: Name Generators


> <snipt!>
> > Male:
> > JEWEL INLOW
> >
> > Female:
> > EUGENIA HENNIGAN
> > Matt
>
> Great, Matt.
>
> I really wanna be a guy named Jewel, or a girl named
> Eugenia. ;)

Well, Eugenia *is* the female form of Eugene...

As to other oddities, I have actually edited the name list a tad, to get
rid of Mark, Andrew, Peter, John, etc as 'female' names.

As to the rest, they are pretty much as provided by the US Census
returns. On the site where I got the data
rom( http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/ ) they explain the
methodology the used to collate the lists, and how they dealt with
people transposing first and last names on the census forms (Smith John
instead of John Smith etc). There are undoubtedly a few Last names
masquerading as first names in the list, and vice versa, but in general
these are names used by people in the good ol' US of A.

A couple of people have asked me if the data is weighted in any way, and
the raw data I obtained does have statistical info, but after the first
hundred or so names the probability is already less than 0.001% (Smith
has the highest at just a hair over 1%, and it rapidly drops off), so
just to save size in my data I decided to ignore weighting. I might put
it in in a later version (As a token gesture, and just because I needed
1 more last name to balance the numbers, 'Smith' is listed twice...).

Someone else wanted to know the structure of the data and formulae I am
using (as they don't have Excel, and want to write an actual program to
do the job). Well, the only reason I did it in excel was that I needed a
name generator for my traveller game last Monday night, and by
mid-afternoon Monday, hadn't found one that seemed suitable on the web.
Then I found the census data, and in about 10 minutes I had a basic,
functioning name generator using simple vlookup functions in Excel,
which was all I had to hand.

There are two sheet in the workbook, Names (which is the visible 'front
page' with the formulae), and NameList (which is hidden and holds the
data)

On namelist column A is numbered 1-44400, B is the first 44400 Last
names, C the next 44400 last names (the split is because the maximum
number of rows in an excel column is 65536, and I had 88,799 last
names...), D is the 1219 Male names and E the 4227 Female names.
A1:E44400 is a named block called 'names'

The formulae are:

Male: =VLOOKUP(INT((RAND()*1219)+1),Names,4)
Female: =VLOOKUP(INT((RAND()*4227)+1),Names,5)
Last: =VLOOKUP(INT((RAND()*44400)+1),Names,INT(RAND()*2)+2)

If anyone wants to make their own generator, I suggest visiting the web
site I quoted earlier, though their data is about a 3MB download in
total.

HTH,

Matt