What’s in a name?

To add to another ritual of naming, here comes an article that suggests initials predispose individuals to certain qualities or academic/professional achievements:

Baseball. Strikeouts are recorded with the letter K in baseball (for the sports impaired: a strikeout is a bad thing for a batter). Nelson and Simmons found that across 90 years of professional baseball, players whose names—whether first or last—began with a K have been slightly more likely to strikeout than anyone else.


Academic performance. Nelson and Simmons then looked at MBA applicants over 15 years to a large US university. They hypothesised that people whose names began with C or D would find these grades less aversive and so strive less hard to avoid them. And that’s what they found: applicants whose first or last name began with a C or D had lower GPAs. It was only a small effect, but significant across 14,000 applicants.

Law school. The same pattern was seen in law schools: lawyers with initials of A or B were found to have attended better law schools than those with initials of C or D.

Read the article to find out the explanations for these correlations.

I take these articles with a grain of salt, but do find them entertaining.

I Edit Myself Out

I’m sorry, this blog has been somewhat of that oddball stack, a place where I put whatever doesn’t fit in my other websites. You know that space between the kitchen stove and the counter where crumbs and god-knows-what go to the mysterious kitchen abyss until the stove breaks and you need to replace it? And at that point, you really do not want to see or know what has accumulated in the space. That space is turning out to be this blog. I’m so sorry, blog. I will remedy that. I hope.

I’ve always wanted to have this space as a place where I can just unload my thoughts and not have to worry someone asking me the next hour, the next day, the next week, what I mean about what I posted. A word, a feeling, a thought is said for the purpose of writing. Nothing more. Should I put a disclaimer that says, “It’s not about you, it’s about me.”?

So again, I will try to put more effort here, focus on the goal of blogging.

Why Your Gut Is More Ethical Than Your Brain

If you’ve ever been part of a discussion on ethics, in school or elsewhere, chances are you didn’t spend much time talking about your feelings. It’s believed that to live ethically, we must engage our reason, which reins in the whims and follies of emotion. Ethics, then, is heavy on Spock and light on Sally Struthers. But what if unethical behavior is actually spurred, rather than prevented, by reason? [Link]

Good read on ethics in business.