My friend Judy used to always say that whenever she met another Judy, she knew exactly how old that Judy was—to the day.
Now that level of precision might be a bit of a stretch, but, as the above map wonderfully shows, there's good reason for that line of thinking. The most popular baby girl names in the United States are flashes in the pan—each one appearing on the map briefly, before being swept out by an up-and-comer.
The map was built in Adobe Illustrator by Deadspin's Reuben Fischer-Baum using data from the Social Security Administration. "Color palette," Fischer-Baum wrote to me over email, "has to be credited to Stephen Few, from his excellent data viz book Show Me The Numbers." Earlier drafts gave each name a unique color, he says, but in the end "it was a lot cleaner and more
