Baby Names

With the arrival of my niece (perfect and adorable), I've had baby names on the brain. Because naming a child is such an emotional decision, there's really not much of a method beyond using the force... or so I thought.

Surfing around I found a site that gives an overview of the Baby Name Report Card, a PDF study done by Albert Mehrabian, Ph.D. It's a study that gives general consensus associations of names. The idea is to see if most people will react to "Knut" with the same heart-melting responses of little Knut's parents when they named him.

So now, in addition to criteria such as making sure your baby's name doesn't sound like a bodily function, rhyme with something appalling, produce the acronym UFO (or other embarrassing abbreviations), there's a method out there to see just how many times little Knut will get pummled on the playground.