TWMM: Russia's Canal

In the 1930s, the Soviet Union undertook a massive construction project. England had Suez. America had Panama. The USSR's White Sea-Baltic Canal was just as massive an undertaking.

The massive canal starts at Saint Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland, travels up the Neva River and into the massive Lake Ladoga before it cuts overland for many miles until it reaches another massive and more remote freshwater lake, Onega, and from there it heads due north, through even more remote regions and through smaller lakes until at last it reaches the White Sea not too far from Archangel'sk, Russia's great northern port.

The canal doesn't save nearly as much time as the other two great canals of the world, but it allows purely domestic transport from Russia's second largest city to anywhere along the northern coast, without any need for routing past Germany and all of Scandinavia--and in the 1930s, finding a shortcut around Germany had its advantages.

The canal took less than two years to build and was hailed as a wonder of Soviet engineering, a triumph of the Five Year Plan.

Over 100,000 laborers, most of them conscripts against their will, died in the construction of the canal.

A popular brand of cigarettes, Belomorkanal, commemorated the epic feat for the Soviets for decades to come:
These unusual cigarettes were 'papirosas'; they were very strong and had no filters. They are still made today.

And for many years the canal, like the cigarettes, thrived; its yearly tonnage peaked in the late days of the Soviet Union, in 1985, when over 7 million tonnes passed through the canal.

But those days are over. Because the canal is too shallow, and because Russia is a shadow, and because the route is not so necessary anymore, this once-great waterway wrought by human hands at the cost of a hundred thousand lives sees hardly thirty ships a day plying its lonely route toward the vast northern reaches of an empire resurgent only when its past decline is ignored.

Two Word Summary of 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button'

WARNING: The following post contains significant spoilers for the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The summary below gives away every moment of the entire film, so take caution.


Memento Mori.


End spoilers.

This has been the first edition of the new weekly Axis Monday feature, "Tuesdays with Memento Mori." Look forward to a fuller edition next week!

Apostolic Names in the US

One out of every twelve male children born in America in 1880 bore the name of one of the Apostles.
Nowadays, barely one baby boy in forty bears that honor.

The following chart, using data which I gathered from this site shows how trends in Apostolic names (plus Jesus) has changed in the last century and a quarter. The rank is pretty simple; John was the most popular name in 1880, etc. The number columns show how many babies bore that name per million.


Totals: 77890 baby boys per million bore one of these names in 1880.
60,405 in 1950.
25,400 in 2007.


An important caveat: this list does NOT include non-English versions of these names. The only spelling variant is for Philip, which may be spelled with one L or two. But Juans, Jeans, Johanns, Ioannises etc. are excluded. So if you'd like you can consider this Apostolic Names among WASPS rather than in the USA as a whole.

Also note that Nathaniel only appears in the Gospel of John; he is usually equated to Bartholomew.


I won't analyze what these changes say about the changing nature of the US--I suspect that demographic changes are the most important factor anyway--but consider the other trends this brief survey reveals.


1. 50% more boys bore the name John in 1880 than bear the name of all the Apostles combined in 2007.

2. A handful of apostles are doing better now, notably Andrew, which has jumped 17 ranks, and Matthew, which has jumped over 100 into the very top tier. Jesus has also gotten more popular; this is almost certainly because of the Hispanic version of the name. Nathaniel has done OK too.

3. Andrew was the 10th most popular name of 2007, with 4200 boys. Thomas was the 10th most popular name of 1880, with 11000 boys. Think about that for a second. The 1880 U.S. Census established the U.S. population at a hair above 5o million. Now it's over 300 million. You would think that the number of children bearing the 10th most popular name would increase, not drop by more than half. In a nutshell, this shows how much more diverse America has become... even in the fairly trivial matter of names. The name pool is much, much larger nowadays.

4. Bartholomew has completely dropped off the list... it has not appeared in the top 1000 most popular boys names in over 100 years.

5. James stayed just about the same for the first 70s years of the study (Note again, confirming #3, that the absolute number of babies with the name dropped by 2k/million even as the rank jumped from 3 to 1), but then dropped off sharply in the modern era. How curious.

6. Unsurprisingly, basically nobody is EVER named Judas.

On the female side, the name 'Mary' was the single most popular name for girls from 1880 through 1950. It has sharply dropped in popularity since the 1970s. At the name's peak in the 1880s, over 3% of newborn girls were named Mary. Only John was a more popular name, but it didn't last quite so long.


It is worth mentioning that although Apostolic names have declined dramatically in popularity, Biblical names as a whole still maintain their currency. The #1 boys' name in 2007 was Jacob; Michael was #2. Girls seemed to have escaped their Biblical roots, for the nonce: the second most popular name, Isabel, is Biblical, but much more indirectly; it comes from Elisheva, who was Aaron's wife. The most popular girl's name, Emily, is Roman in origin.


What do you think these trends signify, if anything?

BANANA

Behold the wild banana:
The wild banana belongs on Axis Monday for a very simple reason: it is wondrous!

Rather, the wild banana tastes and looks really gross. But it is wondrous that man has wrought the spirit of nature into a form so much more suitable for him. Without icky seeds.