Just like the Guess Your Age booth at the Carnival, Excel can guess your age from your given name. In episode 2348, we will take a look at the Wolfram Alpha data types for Given Name, Fictional Character, Amusement Parks, Notable Texts, and Authors.
Transcript of the video:
[ ♫♫ ] theme music [ ♫ ].
Learn Excel from MrExcel podcast episode 2348.
Guess your age from your given name.
And books, roller coasters, superheroes and authors. Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
I am Bill Jelen.
It was a week ago when I tried to use Wolfram Alpha data types to guess people's age based on their favorite music acts.
Well this week, I am going to try something completely different. Still using Wolfram Alpha data types.
And instead of the Excel MVPs, I went out to the 5825 people who have left comments on this YouTube channel. I chose the top comment creators.
The people have been commenting for a long time, or just had a lot of comments.
All of these folks right here.
I want to thank you for your continued support of the channel. I tried to guess your given name.
Maybe i got it. Maybe I didn't. It is hard to say.
Using these given names, can I figure out your age? Let's get started.
Hey, speaking of YouTube comments.
It was Robert Flynn who asked "Can you show us what they have on amusement parks?" So, certainly. Number of rides. Number of roller coasters is there.
We can take a look at the card here for other fields. Where it is.
City, Country, Latitude, Longitude. Some dates. The date that it opened.
Whether or not it's still open. Status. Open year round? Website.
Dimensions. Number of rides. Image location. Local map.
So kind of cool.
If you are a roller coaster fan you can figure out which parks have the most roller coasters.
Well, we've seen in the past how the Wolfram Alpha data types have real people like musicians.
But they also have a whole list of fictional characters here.
So your favorite comic book characters or movie characters are here with some interesting information.
But, do they have US? That's the big question.
Well, at least they have our given names. So I put everyone's given names in here.
I went to Data, Data Types, and chose Automatic.
I actually put the name and then a space and then "given name".
For a lot of them, it just popped right up.
But then others, like Chris asked if I meant "Chris a male" or "Chris a female".
So there were actually a lot here where I had to choose. Now, let's see what kind of information they offer.
We have alternate versions so is this name like Andreas is Andre or Andy Dennis, Dean, Den, Denny or Dino. Dino - what a great name. I had a cousin named Dino.
Hey Dino, how's it going? Then the origin of the name.
This one is a short form.
But sometimes it's something like Old Celtic element meaning hill or high or noble.
But the things that are pretty interesting here are the ones where they will guess your age.
How can they guess your age? I've actually seen this trick before. So, here i have Mike.
Short form of Michael.
No alternate versions which is weird it should list Michael.
The current naming frequency and then how many people are alive today with that name: 166,710.
And the most common age. The way they get that is they take the U.S.
births. So this graph is =A3.[ history for U.S. births ].
Figure out average lifespans.
So these people who were born back in the 1880s are probably not with us anymore.
So then based on that, how old are all the current living Mikaels.
And you can see somewhere here about 49 or 50 is where it peaks. So their guess for the most common age is 50.
I remember at the amusement park, You would pay a guy two bucks and he would guess your age, guess your weight, or guess the month you were born.
I am sure he wasn't doing anything as scientific as this. But, let's see what happens here.
So we'll get rid of these two columns. Right-click and Delete.
Then say that we want to see Most Common Age.
Really, it would be great if I could throw out anything less than 10. Most common age greater than 10.
That would be a very very cool way to go.
There is a lot of people here that the name has become much more common . Like, for example, Oz.
You know a lot more people are naming their kids Oz ever since the Excel on Fire channel became a thing on YouTube.
Then people were thinking "oh that Oz guy is super cool.We are going to name our kid Oz".
Well, obviously, two-year-olds aren't leaving comments on the channel So that one's not really accurate. But a few of these like here let's let's look up Bill.
It says 51. That's close. They got the right decade.
If we come back here and type in an 11.
This will switch to Bill. The notable person with his name is Bill Gates.
How cool is that?
And there were kind of a couple of peaks here back in the 1930's. Around 1935, Bill was very popular.
And then right around 1960 and I was born in the 60s.
So it's actually pretty cool what they they came up with here for all of us.
What our age is. I will kind of scroll through there.
Obviously if it says, four or five, it's not close.
If you don't mind down in the YouTube comments if you're in this list you might say "Hey, yeah, that's close for me".
or or not at all. The name, "Ham". It says 81.
i'm not even sure that was Ham's real name.
Then let's see current naming frequency, number of people alive.
Expected total number alive today. We'll sort by that.
High to Low. All right. James 3.7 million people named James. 3.5 million people named John.
3 million people named David. 1.9 million people named Rrichard.
Down here, at the other end of the spectrum. I wonder if this is only in the United States.
Because a lot of people who are possibly from India or elsewhere around the world. Their guess is very low.
And there have to be a lot of people with those names in your country.
So, I am guessing that Wolfram Alpha is basing this on U.S.
Social Security data or something like that.
There's has to be something that they are pulling this data from here. So this is pretty cool.
Also, the other thing I did.
You can see here that you put in a name, and it brings up all the notable people with this name. And then from this cell right here from F7.
I ask for the image.
So it's kind of cool to go through and see for each of these names.
For your name, who is the most famous person that has that particular name.
So for me, it's Bill Gates. There is a variety of people.
There is Harry Potter - Daniel Radcliffe . Some singers.
Politicians. Heads of State. Jack Black.
How do they decide that a particular person is the most notable? I am not sure.
But at least you know, when you say, "My name is Michelle ".
People will say, "Oh are you Michelle Rodriguez?" And you can so, "No, no, I am the other Michelle. The second most famous Michelle".
So there you go. The new Wolfram Alpha data types.
The one that caught my eye right away was "Notable Texts".
Books. I write books.
Look at all these books they have. They can tell you who the author was. What was the author's date of birth.
That had to be a challenge because 1819?
Excel doesn't recognize dates before 1900. So that one comes in as text.
John Steinbeck, though, comes in as a real date. How about Confucius at 551 BC or negative 0551.
What a challenge to have to put old old dates in there.
If we take Mark Twain. We can see other books written by Mark Twain.
This is great that Wolfram Alpha thinks that these are notable texts.
But. Let's face it. If you're watching this podcast.
These aren't your notable texts.
If you're like me, THESE are the notable texts. These are the texts that I learned excel from.
And the question is does Wolfram Alpha know these texts?? So.
Data, Data Types. Automatic. [ laughing ] Zip! None! None of them.
How disappointing is this?
These are the the books that we use to learn Excel. Let's take the authors that wrote those books.
See if Wolfram Alpha knows any of us.
Certainly John Walkenbach would be in there. Noooooo.
No deal on Walkenbach. Although - hey - hey.
Mike Alexander from Data Pig Technologies, He's the only one. The only one.
Congratulations, Mike you are the baller of all of these Excel authors.
Although...
it's because of your former career as a football player who played for the Los Angeles Raiders and the Buffalo Bills.
Obviously before he started becoming the Excel guy.
Alright. On my quest for a better merch experience.
Better, high-quality shirts. I need 100 thousand subscribers.
Please, down below, Click "Subscribe". Eighty-three percent of you have not subscribed right now.
i won't hassle you. I won't spam you. My new book MrExcel 2020.
Click that "i" in the top right hand corner.
Okay I really want to thank everyone that's watching. I appreciate it.
I appreciate your support of the channel over the years.
I want to thank you for stopping by. We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
[ ♫ ] Tips and tricks.Get you spreadsheet fix at MrExcel.com.
[ ♫ ]
Learn Excel from MrExcel podcast episode 2348.
Guess your age from your given name.
And books, roller coasters, superheroes and authors. Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
I am Bill Jelen.
It was a week ago when I tried to use Wolfram Alpha data types to guess people's age based on their favorite music acts.
Well this week, I am going to try something completely different. Still using Wolfram Alpha data types.
And instead of the Excel MVPs, I went out to the 5825 people who have left comments on this YouTube channel. I chose the top comment creators.
The people have been commenting for a long time, or just had a lot of comments.
All of these folks right here.
I want to thank you for your continued support of the channel. I tried to guess your given name.
Maybe i got it. Maybe I didn't. It is hard to say.
Using these given names, can I figure out your age? Let's get started.
Hey, speaking of YouTube comments.
It was Robert Flynn who asked "Can you show us what they have on amusement parks?" So, certainly. Number of rides. Number of roller coasters is there.
We can take a look at the card here for other fields. Where it is.
City, Country, Latitude, Longitude. Some dates. The date that it opened.
Whether or not it's still open. Status. Open year round? Website.
Dimensions. Number of rides. Image location. Local map.
So kind of cool.
If you are a roller coaster fan you can figure out which parks have the most roller coasters.
Well, we've seen in the past how the Wolfram Alpha data types have real people like musicians.
But they also have a whole list of fictional characters here.
So your favorite comic book characters or movie characters are here with some interesting information.
But, do they have US? That's the big question.
Well, at least they have our given names. So I put everyone's given names in here.
I went to Data, Data Types, and chose Automatic.
I actually put the name and then a space and then "given name".
For a lot of them, it just popped right up.
But then others, like Chris asked if I meant "Chris a male" or "Chris a female".
So there were actually a lot here where I had to choose. Now, let's see what kind of information they offer.
We have alternate versions so is this name like Andreas is Andre or Andy Dennis, Dean, Den, Denny or Dino. Dino - what a great name. I had a cousin named Dino.
Hey Dino, how's it going? Then the origin of the name.
This one is a short form.
But sometimes it's something like Old Celtic element meaning hill or high or noble.
But the things that are pretty interesting here are the ones where they will guess your age.
How can they guess your age? I've actually seen this trick before. So, here i have Mike.
Short form of Michael.
No alternate versions which is weird it should list Michael.
The current naming frequency and then how many people are alive today with that name: 166,710.
And the most common age. The way they get that is they take the U.S.
births. So this graph is =A3.[ history for U.S. births ].
Figure out average lifespans.
So these people who were born back in the 1880s are probably not with us anymore.
So then based on that, how old are all the current living Mikaels.
And you can see somewhere here about 49 or 50 is where it peaks. So their guess for the most common age is 50.
I remember at the amusement park, You would pay a guy two bucks and he would guess your age, guess your weight, or guess the month you were born.
I am sure he wasn't doing anything as scientific as this. But, let's see what happens here.
So we'll get rid of these two columns. Right-click and Delete.
Then say that we want to see Most Common Age.
Really, it would be great if I could throw out anything less than 10. Most common age greater than 10.
That would be a very very cool way to go.
There is a lot of people here that the name has become much more common . Like, for example, Oz.
You know a lot more people are naming their kids Oz ever since the Excel on Fire channel became a thing on YouTube.
Then people were thinking "oh that Oz guy is super cool.We are going to name our kid Oz".
Well, obviously, two-year-olds aren't leaving comments on the channel So that one's not really accurate. But a few of these like here let's let's look up Bill.
It says 51. That's close. They got the right decade.
If we come back here and type in an 11.
This will switch to Bill. The notable person with his name is Bill Gates.
How cool is that?
And there were kind of a couple of peaks here back in the 1930's. Around 1935, Bill was very popular.
And then right around 1960 and I was born in the 60s.
So it's actually pretty cool what they they came up with here for all of us.
What our age is. I will kind of scroll through there.
Obviously if it says, four or five, it's not close.
If you don't mind down in the YouTube comments if you're in this list you might say "Hey, yeah, that's close for me".
or or not at all. The name, "Ham". It says 81.
i'm not even sure that was Ham's real name.
Then let's see current naming frequency, number of people alive.
Expected total number alive today. We'll sort by that.
High to Low. All right. James 3.7 million people named James. 3.5 million people named John.
3 million people named David. 1.9 million people named Rrichard.
Down here, at the other end of the spectrum. I wonder if this is only in the United States.
Because a lot of people who are possibly from India or elsewhere around the world. Their guess is very low.
And there have to be a lot of people with those names in your country.
So, I am guessing that Wolfram Alpha is basing this on U.S.
Social Security data or something like that.
There's has to be something that they are pulling this data from here. So this is pretty cool.
Also, the other thing I did.
You can see here that you put in a name, and it brings up all the notable people with this name. And then from this cell right here from F7.
I ask for the image.
So it's kind of cool to go through and see for each of these names.
For your name, who is the most famous person that has that particular name.
So for me, it's Bill Gates. There is a variety of people.
There is Harry Potter - Daniel Radcliffe . Some singers.
Politicians. Heads of State. Jack Black.
How do they decide that a particular person is the most notable? I am not sure.
But at least you know, when you say, "My name is Michelle ".
People will say, "Oh are you Michelle Rodriguez?" And you can so, "No, no, I am the other Michelle. The second most famous Michelle".
So there you go. The new Wolfram Alpha data types.
The one that caught my eye right away was "Notable Texts".
Books. I write books.
Look at all these books they have. They can tell you who the author was. What was the author's date of birth.
That had to be a challenge because 1819?
Excel doesn't recognize dates before 1900. So that one comes in as text.
John Steinbeck, though, comes in as a real date. How about Confucius at 551 BC or negative 0551.
What a challenge to have to put old old dates in there.
If we take Mark Twain. We can see other books written by Mark Twain.
This is great that Wolfram Alpha thinks that these are notable texts.
But. Let's face it. If you're watching this podcast.
These aren't your notable texts.
If you're like me, THESE are the notable texts. These are the texts that I learned excel from.
And the question is does Wolfram Alpha know these texts?? So.
Data, Data Types. Automatic. [ laughing ] Zip! None! None of them.
How disappointing is this?
These are the the books that we use to learn Excel. Let's take the authors that wrote those books.
See if Wolfram Alpha knows any of us.
Certainly John Walkenbach would be in there. Noooooo.
No deal on Walkenbach. Although - hey - hey.
Mike Alexander from Data Pig Technologies, He's the only one. The only one.
Congratulations, Mike you are the baller of all of these Excel authors.
Although...
it's because of your former career as a football player who played for the Los Angeles Raiders and the Buffalo Bills.
Obviously before he started becoming the Excel guy.
Alright. On my quest for a better merch experience.
Better, high-quality shirts. I need 100 thousand subscribers.
Please, down below, Click "Subscribe". Eighty-three percent of you have not subscribed right now.
i won't hassle you. I won't spam you. My new book MrExcel 2020.
Click that "i" in the top right hand corner.
Okay I really want to thank everyone that's watching. I appreciate it.
I appreciate your support of the channel over the years.
I want to thank you for stopping by. We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
[ ♫ ] Tips and tricks.Get you spreadsheet fix at MrExcel.com.
[ ♫ ]
