In my last post I showed three of the top boys names for babies in 2025. Today I’ll discuss the top three baby girls’ names for 2025 in order from first to third: Olivia, Amelia, and Charlotte. See the graphic.

Much like the boys’ names, these show two names that only became popular in recent decades and one (Charlotte) that may be considered old-fashioned but with a recent resurgence. Remember, these are not to scale, so the true top of Amelia’s scale should be slightly below Olivia’s if they were on the same scale. The relevant points are that although Olivia is still number one, it is declining, while the other two are gaining or at least at the top of their popularity. Why?

Gemini attributes Olivia’s popularity to a combination of media figures or characters including Olivia Newton-John (too early IMHO), Olivia Kendall (The Cosby Show) and on two daytime soap operas. Maybe, but I’m not convinced, and in any event, those don’t explain the decline. It attributes Amelia to America following the British trend where it was number one in 2011, but especially when the Dr. Who character Amelia “Amy” Pond was introduced in 2010. I don’t trust AI in general, but I can’t disprove these. I do note that there are many other popular Amelias like Amelia Bedelia of children’s lit and Amelia Bones in the Harry Potter series.

Sticking with Gemini for now, it says Charlotte’s gradual rise is not due to a recent pop culture cause, but is rather consistent with a 100-year cycle, reportedly a common phenomenon. It says names become stale “grandma” names after awhile and decline until 100 years later, more or less, then become trendy “vintage” names. It also attributes it in part to the general trend of this century using girl’s names that can double as tomboy names, like Charlie in this case. Copilot (another AI) attributes these changes more to saturation (Olivia now being oversaturated, and the other two not yet saturated). I buy that as I know my own kids didn’t want to name their kids anything that seemed to common. I’m just having fun speculating. This may all be BS.

It’s been a few years since I’ve examined popular baby names. I’m always fascinated by what names people choose for their babies and why. So I’ve updated my list to include the 2025 baby names from the Social Security website. Let’s take a look at three of the most popular boy’s names for 2025. I’ll do girl’s names in my next post. Liam, Noah, and Theodore ranked 1st, 2nd and 4th in 2025 for boys. Consider this graphic

Liam and Noah barely appeared prior to 1990, which is why I cut those years off. Theodore, on the other hand, was a very popular names at one time, died down, then has had a recent resurgence. Why? It’s fun to speculate, so I will.

Liam Neeson was a B-list actor until he landed the role of Oskar Schindler in the blockbuster movie Schindler’s List. He was nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars that year. That’s about when the name Liam took off. He’s had some big roles since, including in the Star Wars spinoff movies and the Taken series. That’s my guess for Liam. Gemini AI speculates that the same effect occurred with Noah when Noah Wyle became the star of the television series ER in 1994. I never watched it, but that makes sense to me. I haven’t been able to find a cultural trigger for the resurgence of Theodore, but I suspect it is part of a larger trend favoring old family or “vintage” names. Theodore gained in rank from 2017 to 2020 more than any other boys’ name. My own grandson was named Maxwell (Max), another old-fashioned name that had a resurgence around that time and in fact had a similar long-term pattern to Theodore.

The scales for the charts are slightly different to accommodate all the highs and lows, so you can’t compare one chart to another. They are consistent for each year throughout each separate chart.

Kobuk the Destroyer: And Other Tales from the Wild, Unseen World of Test Engineering by Alex Davies
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Kobuk is a large bear in a zoo who is used to test “bear-proof” containers for outdoor product makers. If Kobuk can get into it, it’s not bear-proof. The book is the non-fiction description of product testing and all the types and their ins and outs. It’s clearly written and very informative. I’d hoped for a few more juicy bits – disastrous failures due to lack of, or the wrong type of, testing, for example. The title and cover suggest it’s more lighthearted than it really is. There was little of that, although a reasonable amount for a serious book. I found it interesting if a bit dry, so I skimmed a bit in the second half. There was some repetition. I rate it three and half stars.

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Rock Paper Scissors by Alice Feeney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was rated highly by a good friend so I really wanted to like it a lot. I did become engrossed in the story. The suspense was there and I really liked the posh British accents of the readers. It also had several twists I did not foresee which counts. It’s worth a solid three stars, but I can’t go higher because I just didn’t like any of the characters. There is plenty of foreshadowing that someone is likely to die, but you don’t know who or why. I came to wish they’d all get bumped off since I didn’t like any of them. The plot twists were too unbelievable and relied on the unlikely circumstance that one central character has prosopagnosia (face blindness) and can’t recognize anybody, even his own wife. If you like twisty mysteries, give it a shot, but if you need someone to root for, this is not your cup of tea.

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Cold Zero by Brad Thor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this spy/action thriller CIA operative Kasey exfiltrates a scientist from China along with his invention, but the Chinese bring down the plane in the arctic where it lands on sheet ice. The Chinese send an icebreaker to retrieve the scientist and his invention while a stray Russian sub senses an opportunity and heads there. The Americans send a sub and a seaplane that way to rescue the survivors. That’s the early set up and it’s played for all it’s worth with unexpected turns and plenty of action. All in all it’s a worthy high-tech thriller with plenty of military jargon and weapon knowledge on display. No, not all the good guys come out alive.

Even so, there were a couple of significant gaps in the author’s knowledge that disappointed me. He made the all-too-common mistake of thriller writers, especially TV types, of confusing and conflating geosynchronous satellites, like weather satellites, with spy ones. At one point one military expert called for a satellite to “hover” over the crash site. Satellites can’t hover; they orbit! Spy satellites are in low orbit ~150-300 miles up and orbit the Earth every 90 minutes or so. They’re only in line of sight of a spot on the ground for maybe 5-10 minutes, then on the next few passes will not go over that same spot. The only satellites that can stay over one spot on the Earth are orbiting at around 22,000 miles (7 to 10 times higher than the spy ones) and right over the equator. They are much too high to get useful resolution of small surface features like ships or people, and in any event can never be in a polar orbit. Yet writers use this mistaken idea all the time. The TV show 24 was notorious for it. A drone can hover, but the crash site in this book was too far away for continuous drone coverage and weather would have prevented it anyway. Take a physics course before attempting to write a sciency novel, folks. I can forgive it, though; it was a fun enough read.

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I’m still enjoying creating music using the SUNO platform. I continue to specialize in updating old American songs prior to 1930 or so. As a break from my book reviews, I thought I’d share a couple of my recent ones, both duets as it happens.

Oh! Baby What a Night was published in 1929 with lyrics by A. Seymour Brown and music by Albert Von Tilzer

Rock It in Rhythm was a Tampa Red song from 1937.