The Experimenters by Blank on Blank: Jane Goodall

Blank on Blank: Famous Names, Lost Interviews, Animated Shorts


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Slava's Snow Show

We did it!
It's been almost 15 years since we watched this work of wonder - twice, in my case.
Now we managed to take the kids and they absolutely loved it.

European Occupational Surnames - alas, not my own

I made it with Cartopy, Shapely, and Natural Earth data. The surnames are taken mainly from the appropriate Wikipedia page. Redditors provided data for Sweden, Norway, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey, and Catalonia (Ferrer = Smith), as well as corrected my mistakes in Ukraine and Austria. I sincerely appreciate their help. Click on the links to see relevant comments.

This is a quick hack, not serious research. The map takes into account countries rather than ethnic or cultural areas (update as of October 1, 2015: now the maps of Spain and Serbia include the most frequent Catalan and Kosovar occupational surnames, respectively). The methodology is simplistic: I always picked the most frequent occupational surname even though Wikipedia aptly notices that in the Netherlands the set of {Smit, Smits, Smid, de Smit, Smet, Smith} outnumbers both {Visser, Visscher, Vissers, de Visser} and {Bakker, Bekker, de Bakker, Backer}. Similarly, redditors commented that {Schmidt, Schmitt, Schmitz, Schmid} outnumber {Meier, Meyer, Maier, Mayer} and {Müller} in Germany, {Maier, Mair, Mayer} outnumber {Huber} in Austria, {Seppälä, Seppänen} outnumber {Kinnunen} in Finland, and {Herrero, Herrera, Ferrer} outnumber {Molina} in Spain. I learned that occupational surnames are alien to Nordic countries so Möller and Møller are relatively rare imports in Sweden and Norway, that Molina and Ferreira are “second-order occupational surnames” as they derive from places rather than from professions, and that surnames in Turkey are so recent invention that Avcı probably was not a real occupation.

In case this is not obvious, the political boundaries and the disappearance of the smallest countries on the map are is not my fault.

 Marcin Ciura's blog