Dogs and fat tails

I was reading a blog post on boat names because it was on Hacker News this morning. The post contained a link to a data set on dog names in NYC and I poked around the data a little. The top names were not at all what I expected, but then again this is limited to NYC; it’s not a sample across the US. These were the top 10 names: Bella Luna Max Charlie Coco Lola Rocky Milo Teddy Lucy I wondered if the name frequencies might fit a power-law distribution. They do not, but they follow a log-normal distribution remarkably well. The post Dogs and fat tails first appeared on John D. Cook.