I found myself with 37,407 names that had been used for males, and 62,318 for females – so we immediately see that there’s a lot more diversity for female names. Of all these, 9800 are common to both genders – but only 8,564 have instances with both genders in the same year. Any such year I could use for a scatter plot of the proportion of males with a given name, out of all people with that name. So a value of 1 indicates a name was assigned only to males that year, with 0 showing that only females received it. Here’s the ratios for `Hilary’:

Proportion of male Hilarys.

This is a little misleading as it suggests that there was always a 10-20% proportion of Hilarys who were female, but pay attention to the scale – there are no years before 1910 that featured both male and female Hilarys. A quick glance at the raw figures shows that there was a lead-in period where only men (orange) might have the name Hilary, before it started being used for both genders, then became predominantly a female (green) name:

Male (orange) and Female (green) Hilarys.

We can also see that Hilary became far more popular as a female name than it ever was for men, before its spectacular crash in the 1990s. This event was even more disastrous for the name’s masculine use – there are no instances at all after 1993 (although I believe the SS data suppresses any name used only a handful of times in a given year, in interests of anonymity).

I tried to find the most significant example of a traditionally male name transitioning to a female one: I measured this by comparing the difference in maximum and minimum ratios through time. Under this measure, ‘Aubrey’ has most thoroughly shifted gender; in 1949 all but one of the sixty (over 98%) Aubreys were male, but of the 7277 Aubreys named in 2011 there’s a mere 142 males (just under two percent).

Proportion of male Aubreys.

Male (orange) and Female (green) Aubreys.

My next goal was to find unisex names – those where the ratio is reliably around 0.5. In fact, there are some names which are perfectly unisex in the sense that every year they’re recorded, they’re found equally as male and female names. But that’s because they’re simply not found that often: no name had more than five years in which both genders used it in this way. So I allowed some wriggle room – an average ratio in the range 0.48 to 0.52, but with the requirement that were at least 50 years in which they appeared for both genders. This turned up sixteen names, although of the two with more than a hundred records, one is ‘Unknown’. The other, though, is ‘Dee’:

Proportion of male Dees.

Male (orange) and Female (green) Dees.

This one’s interesting because the average is more on account of balanced periods of predominantly-male or -female use, rather than balanced use each year. Another from this collection is ‘Paris’- on the basis of 79 shared years, it averages 51.3% male use. But again looking at the plot we see that it favoured just one gender, then shifted to the other:

Proportion of male Paris’

Whenever I’ve mentioned this topic online, someone has cheerfully asserted that this process only works one way – that it’s never the case that a traditionally female name becomes adopted for use with males. The data doesn’t seem to back that up as an absolute- although I’d have to do some more sophisticated statistics to determine trendlines, there are some examples which are immediately obvious. To find them, I looked for names where the difference between maximum and minimum usage as a male name was at least 0.8, and the maxium occurred after the minimum. This recovered 16 names: Alpha, Artie, Audie, Caron, Donnie, Frankie, Gerry, Jan, Jean, Joell, Jullian, Karon, Lashawn, Lavon, Robbie, and Taran. (Without the stipulation of an 80% shift, I find many, many more but they can often be explained by the problem of few common years, rather than a genuine trend.)

For instance, here’s the plot for ‘Donnie’:

Proportion of male Donnies.

Male (orange) and Female (green) Donnies.

Attempting to guess some unisex names revealed cases where a name was strongly male, then was taken over by females, before rallying somewhat (which probably explained why I thought of them as being for either gender):

Proportion of male Kims.

Proportion of male Tracys.

Finally, I wanted to test the other idea I commented on – that British surnames are slowly becoming fair game as American female first names! Using this list of the hundred most common British surnames, I found that all but four were registered as first names at some point. However, all 96 feature as male names, but only 60 as female names – so it seems that I’m wrong – it’s males who are receiving ‘surnames’ as first names originally, and then some of those make the cut as female names. This is all rather confusing for me when I’m in the US, where either of my names works as a first or last name, and my last name works as a first name of either gender! In closing, here are the plots for that:

Proportion of male Taylors.

Male (orange) and Female (green) Taylors.

• Boston, United States, from January;
• Assisi, Italy, from March;
• Gibraltar, from June (plus a brief flirtation with planespotting!);
• and Zurich, Switzerland, from October

In the process, I’ve become somewhat hooked on the art of maximising returns from airline and hotel loyalty programs, a task made much easier with the guidance of the wonderful folks of FlyerTalk. With the demise of SoSauce, I’ve been in search of a way to keep travel journals, and so I wrote up both Assisi and Gibraltar for their trip report forum. Be warned, though, that given the audience, the emphasis is more on the technicalities and perks of the journey, than the merits of the destination! I still toy with setting up a straylight subsection for such musings, but would I ever find the time to update it properly?

Here’s the highlight reel from this year’s slow motion filming session at the Bath Upchuck juggling and circus skills convention. More to follow, hopefully!

But in researching my options I found myself immediately confronted by a stack of conflicting information regarding what was or wasn’t possible with the ipad. Presumably to encourage uptake of the higher-capacity models, apple don’t include a memory card slot, nor standard USB sockets, on the ipad. Instead there’s an external connection kit, and establishing which permutations of ipad model / iOS version / camera brand / connection type would co-operate was not easy – perhaps not helped by the lack of tech savvy from some users, as many comments on apple’s site strongly suggested PEBCAK. A visit to the store didn’t allow for a practical test as they didn’t have adaptors in stock, but they were willing to accept a return of the ipad if it proved not to be suitable for purpose. Probably knowing that I’d really struggle to give it back after playing for a while, even if some sort of android tablet would be more useful for my needs!

Well, mine arrived yesterday, and I’m pleased to report that for the Canon 550d (T2i) – and presumably their other sd card based models – it all plays together beautifully. But in trying it out, I stumbled into various other seas of online confusion regarding photo handling, so I thought I’d collect together what I’ve learnt so far (admittedly, in all of 24 hours) in the hopes it helps save others some time/effort. This is not a guide to taking photos with the ipad, which still strikes me as a ridiculous idea!

Photo transfer: from camera to ipad

Apple’s camera connection kit supplies two adaptors – one for SD cards, the other for USB. Both are in theory viable options for accessing content from a 550d, and indeed both work in practice; I prefer using the card reader rather than trying to cable the camera to the pad. But whichever method you use, the effect is the same: on connection, the ipad’s Photos app launches, and you can select to import either all images or specific shots. Post import, you have the option to delete the originals from the card or keep them. The sorting is rather basic: you get new albums called “Last Import” and “All Imported”, and under the events tab you get collections by date. So there’s no way to go through and group photos by trip, for instance.

However, despite the filing shortcomings, you do get the full 5148*3456 image, and RAW format is supported (if you shoot in RAW+JPEG, it imports both); so you get to take full advantage of that high-res screen. Even more surprising, it’ll import full-HD video too, as Canon provides footage in mp4, one of the few formats the ipad won’t turn its nose up at.

Alternative: from USB memory stick to ipad

You can also import in exactly the same way from a USB stick, provided you mimic the file structure of a camera card: there must be a folder called DCIM, in which all the files (again RAW and JPEG both work, as does suitable video) must reside (sub-folders might be ok, I haven’t investigated that). The process is identical to above, and you get the full-resolution images, so that’s a quick and easy way to import from a computer without the overhead (or resolution drop, see below) of going through itunes.

Photo transfer: from a computer via itunes

If you want to be able to showcase work that already resides on a computer, you can transfer it with itunes. This has the advantage of preserving directory structure: so instead of the date-sorted events, you can have thematic albums like Boston highlights 2012 or Mathematical Art or whatever. However, itunes (which is becoming an increasingly-clunky general file manager for idevices, rather than just handling music) has a fairly crude sync system: you can specify a root directory, then you either get everything within that (recursing all subdirectories) or can select a subset of its subdirectories – but no further. So, for instance, with my filing system of Pictures->life stage->home location->year->event name->subtheme it’s impossible for me to just pick out a few favoured subtheme folders without restricting to a single event; or to get one year from each of two locations. As a workaround, I’ve created a new folder called ipad selection which gets synced in its entirety, and I export desired content from picasa to subfolders of that; it means duplicating on the computer anything I want to have on the ipad, but desktop disk space is cheap!
A further niggle is that during the process, itunes drops the resolution of any file over 14.2MP; for the 550d’s 3-by-2 aspect ratio, this means you get an image of size 4608 by 3072 on the ipad post-sync.

Photo transfer: from ipad as a storage device to a computer

Being able to back up photos as full-res JPEG and/or RAW to the ipad is only really of use if you can retrieve them in that state – especially if you’ve been using it to filter out the bad shots or do some basic corrections with iphoto, so you’ll be wanting to start your desktop workflow from that stage, rather than the card contents (you are keeping the files on the cards too whilst away, right?). Fortunately, if you connect via USB to a computer, the ipad appears just as a USB mass storage device would, with a DCIM folder containing any images that were imported to it; on windows this’ll trigger the usual autoplay options to import with your photo manager of choice, or browse manually. Note that this doesn’t include files that were synced across from another machine via itunes, just the contents of the ‘all imports’ folder or images created/saved with apps.

Photo transfer: from ipad apps

With the photo app, you have options for email, message, tweet and print; you can also set an image as wallpaper or assign it to an address book contact. Other apps such as facebook can also access the photo library (both imports and synced content). iPhoto is another £2.50 (apple being annoyingly cheap and not including it out the box), but has a broader set of built-in sharing options: journal, the camera roll, itunes, email, beam, print, twitter, flickr and facebook. Plus you can do some basic editing first, and it offers information that the photo app really should, like image resolution and some exif data.

It’s also possible to sync a buffer of images between apple devices / computers using icloud, but since I only have the pad (and would rather import manually as if it were a mass storage device, rather than try to pull RAW files through my internet connection) I’ve not really looked into it.

Photo-viewing online

Here’s where things get quite a bit messier. Although the retina display is 2048 by 1536, if you attempt to view a photo that’s too large in safari – or, it seems, any other browser – it’ll first get downsized to (at most) 1024 by 768. This makes sense on iOS platforms that can’t display more than that anyway, but on the ipad3 it’s a terrible idea, as to fill the real 2048-wide screen with the virtual 1024-wide window, the image then has to be interpolated back up! So you only use a quarter of the available pixels to construct an image on a screen that could have handled all of them… This effect has been documented and illustrated (if you’re using an ipad) here, where the meaning of ‘too large’ has been precisely pinned down: PNG format files aren’t affected, and using progressive jpg may be a workaround, provided everything in your workflow, such as picasa or flickr, preserves that. I ran into it whilst using flickr’s all-sizes mode, when I noticed that my 1800 by 1200 images were coming out physically smaller – and uglier – than the 1024 by 683 versions flickr was generating. What this means in practice is that, for viewing a JPEG on an ipad3, you’re better off supplying a 1773 by 1182 image to flickr (or elsewhere) that will be used in its entirety, rather than a 1800 by 1200 image that’ll drop to 900 by 600 then get interpolated to fill the real 1800 pixel width. This seems like a glitch – it wouldn’t even save any download time, as the image is presumably grabbed then decimated – but until/unless apple fix it, it’s worth knowing. Especially if you’re trying to show off your fancy new toy’s capabilities!

Relatedly, websites that fit perfectly happy on a 1920 by 1080 display might not work as desired on mobile safari, even though it has a larger canvas to work with. Such as, erm, this site: my HD youtube embedd in the post below fits the central column when viewed from my desktop, but not the ipad. I assume its emulating a width of 1024 to avoid unreadably-small text, but there must be a better solution.

Summary

• You’ll almost certainly want to get iPhoto.
• Both parts of the camera connection kit work fine with a 550d.
• Importing from sd card, from camera by USB, or from an appropriately-structured USB device, will give you the full resolution and RAW files.
• Sync via itunes offers (basic) folder structure, but at the cost of a resolution drop.
• Viewing images online can lead to a substantial resolution drop, to the extent that images just under the threshold will look better than larger ones.

If all that sounds far too confusing, here’s a reverse-chronological summary:

• January 2011: New Orleans.
• October 2010: Seattle.
• March 2010: Malta, Comino and Gozo.
• April 2009: Oslo (airport), Ålesund, Copenhagen, Malmo.
• December 2008: Stockholm and Gothenburg.
• September 2008: Utrecht.
• May 2008: Banff and Lake Louise.
• April 2008: Oslo.
• August 2007: Utrecht/Den Haag and Essen.
• April 2007: Dublin.

That’s an almost-complete list of my wanderings since I got my own passport (suprisingly late in life): notable omissions are my very first trip (to Oslo, in 2004) due to a lack of decent camera kit then; and 2009′s Toronto trip, as I’m going back in September and will probably get better versions of some of my shots from then! There are a few locations I’ve neglected above, though, and I’ve a long way to go before the geo-tagging is even close to complete. I’m also wondering what to do with the stories that go with the pictures (or that don’t have a picture to go with)- for at least my own future benefit I’d like to keep track of them, whilst recognising that there’s nothing particularly special about my opinions on a given restaurant or tourist attraction. Whether I go for a full-fledged blog or more thoroughly annotate the flickr entries is something I’m still debating.

The next big task, though, is to try and impose some order on all my photos of Scotland, then upload the best of those.

I was contacted at the start of the month by a director from NHK’s Tokudane Toko Doga which – as best I can tell – is a ten minute weekly broadcast on interesting youtube videos. Glide had caught their attention, and last week I had the slightly surreal experience of an interview over skype, via an interpreter. The clip above is today’s show, and a few of my slow motion projects appear, between 03:30 and 05:16. Since I don’t speak Japanese I don’t have much idea what’s going on; my first soundbite was in response to the question “What did you feel when you first saw the video?”, and the second is me butchering the name of the show There’s also an entry on their blog, but I can’t read that either!