Articles
How name, address and phone data really works across countries — registries, exceptions and the mistakes we made.
58 articles
- 573 Taiwanese Have a Surname Unicode Cannot EncodeTaiwan's Ministry of the Interior publishes a surname registry with no privacy threshold. Every surname is listed with its exact bearer count, down to the 643 surnames held by exactly one person out o…Read →
- A One-Line Patronymic Rule Breaks on the Tenth NameUkrainian patronymics look like a job for sprintf. Take the father's given name, drop a final -а/-я/-о, append -ович for a son and -івна for a daughter. Іван → Іванович, Іванівна. Петро → Петрович, Пе…Read →
- A Test That Cannot Fail: Checking Whether Your Green Suite Checks AnythingWe have ten regression tests for the name generator. All ten were green. That is not evidence. A test suite reports two things — that the code passes, and that the suite is capable of noticing if it d…Read →
- Authority Is Not a Property of RowsThere is a town council in Uganda called MASAKA TOWN COUNCIL. It has 5,731 residents and it sits in Manafwa District, in the far east of the country, against the Kenyan border. There is also a place c…Read →
- Every Passport in the World Puts the Surname FirstThere is an appealing shortcut for the question "which order does this country write names in?" — look at the passport. It is issued by the state itself, it has captioned fields, and the state presuma…Read →
- Fake Phone Numbers That Cannot Exist: A 12% Defect Hiding in One `mt_rand` CallRoughly one in eight of the American and Canadian phone numbers our generator emitted could not exist. Not "looked odd" — could not exist, in the sense that the North American Numbering Plan forbids t…Read →
- Forty-Eight of Five Hundred: A Classical Surname List Meets a RegistryThe 百家姓 — the Hundred Family Surnames — is an 11th-century Chinese primer. It is a rhymed sequence of surnames written to teach children characters, and it has been reprinted continuously for somethin…Read →
- Four Surnames Cover Half of Vietnam. Ukraine Needs Hundreds. The Concentration Curve ExplainedVietnam's four commonest surnames — Nguyễn, Trần, Lê, Phạm — account for half the country between them. To reach half of Ukraine you need several hundred different surnames. Same measurement, same met…Read →
- Four Surnames That Do Not Exist: Finding Errors in Official Government StatisticsThe US Census Bureau's 2010 surname file says that HALL is carried by 407,076 Americans. The 2000 file said 473,568. Between those two censuses the US population grew by about 9.7%, and HALL apparentl…Read →
- Guessed Weights Cost Ten Times More Than QuantisationFor a long time we described one defect as the serious problem in our name-frequency data: weights squeezed into a single byte, so that half a list ended up tied at the minimum. We wrote it up, we fix…Read →
- Half of Your Weighted List Is Not WeightedA weighted list in which half the rows carry the same minimum weight is not a weighted list. It is a uniform list with a weighted prefix — and nothing in the file, in the schema, or in the test suite …Read →
- How Many Surnames Does a Country Have? Taiwan Has 1,785. Ukraine Has 707,685. Italy Doesn't Know.Ask how many different surnames exist in a country and you expect an answer in the same ballpark everywhere. You don't get one. Taiwan's Ministry of the Interior counted 1,785 surnames for 23.4 millio…Read →