There are more regulations for naming Thoroughbreds than there are for naming human babies. Learn more about horse appropriate names here.

Earlier this month The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article relevant to political/cultural toponymics in “The Chronicle Review,” 6 May 2016, B6-11. It is by Paul Voosen, who titled it “The Oaxaca incident: A geographer’s efforts to map a Mexican village reveal the risks of military entanglement.” The article tells of researchers’ work to map Tiltepec, Oaxaca, including geographical names for the area that only locals know, as well as the difficulties and “entanglements” that the work ran into. If you subscribe, you can read the article at the link above.

“An indispensable Wikipedia list captures the prolific nicknames generated by GW to refer to the people around him.”

Few people have creatures named after them. Even fewer people have multiple creatures named after them. Atlas Obsura reports on all the creatures named naturalist for David Attenborough.

Need a hobbit name? Try this hobbit name generator.

Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. This week’s column discusses that most popular baby names of 2015.

How do bands create names? TaxoDiary shows some interesting graphical band name classifications.

Andrej Karpath, a Stanford computer science PhD candidate, designed a plausible baby name generator, while working on recurrent neural networks (a type of artificial neural network).

According to Wikipedia, “in machine learning and cognitive science, artificial neural networks (ANNs) are a family of models inspired by biological neural networks (the central nervous systems of animals, in particular the brain) which are used to estimate or approximate functions that can depend on a large number of inputs and are generally unknown.”

In this case, Karpath fed the neural network 8000 real baby names as input and generated plausible baby names not in the original data set.

Examples: Antley, Nerille, Chelon, Walmor, Evena, Jeryly, Stachon, Charisa

 

In Duana Taha’s book, The Name Therapist, this “half-Gaelic, half-Egyptian TV screenwriter-slash-baby-name blogger turned advice columnist (on LaineyGossip.com) and self-declared ‘name therapist’ ” explores why names matter. This book review gives additional insight into the name concepts covered in the book and the style in which the author approaches them.

Katniss, Khaleesi, and Renesmee might be new creations, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t legitimate names. For generations, authors have invented names for these characters. Learn which authors invented these 10 popular baby names.