Look, no matter what your job is, you are not going to work for eight hours today. If you work in front of a computer you are probably already slacking off, if you are reading this. The quantity of time in your day that you will spend steadily engaged at the task for which you are being paid may vary, from day to day and job to job, but the point is this: You should spend, like, an hour or two looking at these dog names. Immediately.
The data was compiled by New York City’s department of health and organized into this neat visualization, which allows you to scroll over the conglomeration of bubbles, each of which represents the popularity of a dog name in the city. The biggest bubbles represent the most common names: Bella (1995), Max (1153), Charlie (856), Coco (852), Rocky (823), and so on.
But it’s a lot more fun to just search the database itself and create your own comparisons. For example, there are 15 dogs name Dog, 28 named Puppy, five maliciously named Cat, one named Fish, and another one named, horrifyingly, Phish. There are 16 named Bagel and two named Bagels.
There are many other ways to slice the numbers:
Speaking of Star Wars, there are some lingering questions about the validity of the data set:
Hopefully someone is studiously compiling a broader dataset of dog names throughout the country, and then, we can only hope, the globe. The internet of dogs awaits it.