Afternoon update

The worthies of the afternoon closing of the browser tabs:

• A decade ago, I recommended a method for selecting decent baby names that began with a domain of names with historic standing and selected out recently popular names (see also here). There's now a spreadsheet with the top-100 baby names in New Zealand going back to 1954 over on the government's Smart Start website (where you can register births, etc). HT: FigureNZ


• I'm not going to link to the NZ Herald's stupid clickbait version of an interesting story. China's using explosives rather than fluids in fracking - potentially more environmentally friendly given what those fluids are like. They're conventional explosives... of the types used to detonate nuclear bombs. The big headline "China plans to use a nuclear bomb detonator to release shale gas", with accompanying picture of a mushroom cloud. Most folks won't read through to the bottom of the story to find out, if they didn't already know, that a nuclear detonator isn't radioactive or anything like it. 


• Andrew Coyne has retweeted links to Macleans' excellent story on the Thai cave rescue about a hundred times this weekend. The story is indeed very good. 


• The Globe and Mail highlights how Stats Canada fails to provide open data. Similar stories in New Zealand. The Globe and Mail is putting together a list of knowable things that aren't known because data isn't open (or, in some cases, not collected). It would be very interesting to start compiling a similar list here.