If you know me, you know I’m not a huge sports fan. And you know that I don’t care for math. But, strangely enough, I do appreciate something that is prevalent in both of these fields — statistics. The interwebz have made gathering, processing, and displaying large amounts of statistical data. Here are a couple of links that I’ve run across within the last few weeks.

One is called the Baby Name Wizard, which is a fun little Flash App that gathers popularity of names in different decades of US History. The website says the data comes from the Social Security Administration, which, to me, seems like it would be the authority.

The X-axis demarks the decade (1880s, 1950s, etc) while the Y-axis shows how many babies per million were named whatever it is you type in the top. It also gives you popularity ranking as you roll your mouse over the years.

For example, “Tiffany”, which was practically unheard of (as a first name) before 1950, was ranked 311 most popular name in the 60s, and spiked in the 1980s as the 11th most popular name, with well over 4000 per million babies named “Tiffany”. There’s been a sharp decline in popularity since then; it was in the 200s in popularity in 2007.

Practical for me? No. I don’t plan on naming a baby any time soon. But it is fun to play with, and interesting to see how your name holds up. For example, Butter’s name was the 30th most popular name in the decade when he was born. Mine was 13th most popular for the decade I was born.

Finally, check this one out. It’s the History of World Records, an interactive graphic by NYTimes.com. It shows “how world records in Summer Olympic events have fallen (or risen) in the past century. Scales have been adjusted so percentage changes are comparable, and, to show how certain records compare to each other, speed is sometimes plotted instead of time.”