Baby names from entertainment for Mother's Day 2018

Happy Mother's Day!  To celebrate mothers this Sunday, I'm going to follow up on last year's Baby names from entertainment for Mother's Day 2017 and Baby names inspired by fandom for Mother's Day and 'Star Wars' baby names for Father's Day from two years ago by looking at last year's baby names inspired by entertainment.

I begin with Social Security's Top Ten Baby Names of 2017.

Just arrived! Find out the top 10 baby names of 2017 from Social Security, the source for baby names each year!

Emma, Liam, Logan, and  have definite entertainment and  connections, as Hello Giggles notes.

Emma was the top name for girls last year, the same year that Emma Watson played Belle in Beauty and the Beast and Emma Stone won an Oscar for La La Land.

Not only did the actress's name stay on top, here character's name rose as well.  According to the Social Security baby names page (nothing like going to the source), Belle rose 125 places to 808th from 933th.

Back to Hello Giggles.

Meanwhile, the number one name for baby boys was Liam, and it’s possible that there might have been a few One Direction or Liam Hemsworth fans among parents.

These names have definitely surged in popularity over the past few years. According to the Social Security Administration, Emma was the 17th most popular name in 2000 before its takeover as number one starting in 2014. Meanwhile, Liam skyrocketed from the 140th most popular name in 2000 all the way to the top of the list last year.
...
2 Olivia...You might think of Olivia Pope from Scandal when you hear this name.
3 Ava...The most famous Ava today is probably Ava DuVernay.
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2 Noah...Noah means “rest” or “comfort,” but we can’t help but think of Noah from The Notebook.
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5 Logan...Wolverine’s real first name is Logan, so this name definitely sounds tough.
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10 Jacob...Jacob is another timeless option, although it’s not as popular as it was right after Twilight came out.

Hello Giggles was not alone in noting the entertainment and celebrity connections to last year's popular baby names.  Abby Sandel did as well in Most Popular Baby Names 2018.

Let’s talk about all the news from the new US baby names list, just released today!

Yes, she mentioned Emma and Logan, but she also talked about names outside of the top ten, especially from "Game of Thrones."  Follow over the jump for those and names from Star Wars and both Marvel and DC Comics.

'Star Wars' baby names for Father's Day

Anakin: Baby Name of the Day
I concluded Examiner.com article on Chamber of Commerce endorsements by telling my readers "Stay tuned for a parent-themed entertainment entry on Father's Day.  Right now, I'm planning on following up on Baby names inspired by fandom for Mother's Day with Star Wars names."  I concluded that post with "I would bet on a lot of Finns, Poes, and Reys over the course of the next six years."  Why do I expect that?  Look at the following graphs from Quartz's After each Star Wars film come the Star Wars babies.


(Anakin and Padme)
Yes, after the prequels, both names became more common.  Anakin has staying power as it rose in popularity rose 48 spots from 960th in 2014 to 912th in 2015 according to the Social Security Administration.

Anakin        +48     912     960
Arya           +15     201     216
Khaleesi     -60     816     756

Here is the rank popularity of the name updated to 2015.


What does Anakin mean?
The power of "Star Wars" began with the first film in 1977, as the following graphs from Quartz show.



(Luke and Leia)
It even worked for minor characters.


(Han and Lando)
If Lando got a boost as a name, imagine what will happen to Finn, Poe, and Rey over the course of the next five to eight years while the sequel trilogy plays out.  I can and that's why I made my prediction.

With that, I wish my readers a Happy Father's Day!

Asian air pollution and other global pollution stories

Two weeks ago, the Daily Mail reported China starts televising the sunrise on giant TV screens because Beijing is so clouded in smog.

The smog has become so thick in Beijing that the city's natural light-starved masses have begun flocking to huge digital commercial television screens across the city to observe virtual sunrises.

The futuristic screens installed in the Chinese capital usually advertize tourist destinations, but as the season's first wave of extremely dangerous smog hit - residents donned air masks and left their homes to watch the only place where the sun would hail over the horizon that morning.

The article then goes on to describe the terrible smog and the horrible health problems that result from it.  All of that is true, but the hook is baloney, as Quartz pointed out in Westerners are so convinced China is a dystopian hellscape they’ll share anything that confirms it.

When it comes to China stories, people will believe almost anything. Take, for instance, the reports about pollution being so severe in Beijing that residents now watch radiant sunrises broadcast on a huge screen in Tiananmen Square.

So, that never happened. As Tech in Asia flags, the sunrise is a clip from a tourism ad for Shandong province, in China’s northeast; it’s on screen for maybe 10 seconds or so per loop.

But that didn’t prevent a slew of prominent media outlets—including Time, CBS News and the Huffington Post—from running the story, which originated in the UK-based Daily Mail, each taking their own liberties with the truth. The “glorious sunrise was broadcast as part of a patriotic video loop,” explained Time.

How do stories like this happen? One reason is shabby journalism, something for which the Daily Mail is renowned.

That's why The Daily Mail is called The Daily Fail.  Still, it's a striking image, one that I will use when I next lecture on air pollution.  I already have a photo of air pollution in Beijing.  For balance, I'll also tell my students the full story as a cautionary tale about journalism that appeals to their prejudices.

That written, the air pollution from Asia is real and it's affecting the rest of the planet, as Texas A&M explains in Asian Air Pollution Affecting World’s Weather.

Extreme air pollution in Asia is affecting the world’s weather and climate patterns, according to a study by Texas A&M University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory researchers.

Yuan Wang, a former doctoral student at Texas A&M, along with Texas A&M atmospheric sciences professors Renyi Zhang and R. Saravanan, have had their findings published in the current issue of Nature Communications.
Satellite photo shows huge air pollution clouds at far left. Japan is on the right.

Using climate models and data collected about aerosols and meteorology over the past 30 years, the researchers found that air pollution over Asia – much of it coming from China – is impacting global air circulations.

“The models clearly show that pollution originating from Asia has an impact on the upper atmosphere and it appears to make such storms or cyclones even stronger,” Zhang explains.

“This pollution affects cloud formations, precipitation, storm intensity and other factors and eventually impacts climate.  Most likely, pollution from Asia can have important consequences on the weather pattern here over North America.”

There is much more at the link, including the following image.


Let that be a lesson in "Everything is connected to everything else," "There is no away," and "There is no such thing as a free lunch."

Follow over the jump for more stories that illustrate Commoner's Laws as pollution from one place ends up going somewhere else, as well as other stories about what people are doing about pollution elsewhere on the planet, all of them originally included in Overnight News Digest on Daily Kos.