It also set the stage for one amazing Randy Newman song.

That was actually pretty cool. Maybe Twitter is good for something after all.

I have to go with Paulio and Kevin on this one. You can't just jump right out and call a study like this "a crock" or something like that. It is, in fact, based on hard facts and numbers. We have the names of people who have a criminal record. We have the names of people who don't have a criminal record. We have the names of babies born in the last X numbers of years, and can rank which ones were used the most. Therefore, we can correlate the names of the criminal and non-criminal citizens to the names on that baby name list. That's not a crock, and short of leafing through the research paper and examining the methodology, it's hard to say that the findings are invalid. However, as far as causation goes, saying someone with a different name was treated differently than their peers and therefore committed crimes is pushing it a little. Note they use the word "may" when describing that. It's just part of a bigger theory. I would guess it's much more likely that the people who give their kids "normal" (meaning: far more common on the list of recently named babies) names are much more likely to raise their kids in a "normal" (meaning: respectful, undramatic, legal) way than those parents who don't name their kids with a "normal" name. Since it is parents who give names to their kids, they must become part of the equation. Now, if all children were assigned names at random upon birth, then we'd have a whole new study on our hands.

Yes yes a thousand times yes.

I've seen these in Minneapolis before. It's actually really cool when it happens (in both senses of the word).

I'm not an expert by any means in this area, but if she was to send a single message to a group of 5 people, would that count as having sent 5 messages? Because that math works out a whole lot easier as I see it.