December 12, 2003 - Politics is a Four Letter Word
This week, Al “four-letter” Gore endorsed Howard “four-letter” Dean as his choice for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency against George “four-letter” Bush. The winner will be representing everyone in the USA including those of us living in Santa Barbara County.
The dedicated staff of edhat hit the books yesterday to find out how unusual four-letter names were in Santa Barbara County. We consulted the Holy Grail of names, the Verizon SuperPages. The Nov 2003 edition with Mr. Rooter on the cover.
There are 333 white pages in this edition of the phone book - from Aaberg to Zyza. A senior analyst at edhat estimated there are over 300 phone numbers per page, approximately 100,000 phone numbers in all! Of course, this count does not include faxes, unlisted numbers, and cell phones. Oprah was not in the phone book.
Getting to work, the dedicated staff looked at 611 of these numbers and counted the letters in the last name associated with each number. The cool USA Today looking graph on the left shows the results. As anyone who has taken Stats 101 can see, the most common length name was 6 letters long (25%), followed by 7, 5, and 8. In 5th place was 4 letter names with 9%. The cool USA Today looking graph on the right shows name length of all the major party candidates for President since 1976. You don’t have to be a BCS* statistician to see the difference here!
There were 3 edhat.com subscribers who correctly identified “6” as the most common name length in Santa Barbara. KevinEd was chosen as the winner of the Peet’s coffee card. Peet for President!
* BCS: Bowl Championship Series - the computers who decided that the number 1 ranked USC football team was not worthy of playing for the national championship.
December 12, 2003 - Politics is a Four Letter Word
ted the letters in the last name associated with each number. The cool USA Today looking graph on the left shows the results. 
As anyone who has taken Stats 101 can see, the most common length name was 6 letters long (25%), followed by 7, 5, and 8. In 5th place was 4 letter names with 9%. The cool USA Today looking graph on the right shows name length of all the major party candidates for President since 1976. You don’t have to be a BCS* statistician to see the difference here!
