[conspire] Names and databases.

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

> On Nov 9, 2020, at 01:56, Nick Moffitt <nick at zork.net> wrote:
> 
> Here's an excellent story of what it was like to be a poll worker this year:
> 
> 	https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1325588115503902723.html

FWIW, I’m listed with a first name of Deirdre and a surname of Moen. It took me seven tries to realize that’s how I was registered.

My surname is actually “Saoirse Moen” though. When I entered that for my driver’s license, some fool changed it. At the time, licenses were printed with the name all on one line first last, so I had no way of knowing.

When my renewal came, it separated my name into parts, which it no doubt had been all along, I just didn’t know.

Surname: Moen
First name: Deirdre Saoirse

Now I fucking hate that because one of two things happens in databases:

1. Saoirse would get shortened to S.
2. It would get dropped entirely.

But that is MY part of my surname. Fortunately, my passport is correct. (The first time I was married, I used a hyphen, but this time I used a space so people wouldn’t feel obligated to *try* to pronounce Saoirse.)

I used to have a middle name, but when I changed my surname, it became unique in the world and thus a middle name seemed like pretense.

> Essentially it's a warning tale about the way we abuse names for databases.  Some poll workers wouldn't be able to find voter registrations because they were unable or unwilling to make the effort to understand the ways that non-Anglo names can be mangled by our systems' Anglo assumptions.

> It reminds me of this now-decade-old gem:
> 
> 	https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

This is one of the best things about programmer assumptions I’ve ever read, and long a favorite.

There’s one the author hasn’t listed: Unicode has no coding for your name in your native alphabet.

Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219162 <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219162>

About this article: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name <https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name>


Also, I always love a chance to post a link to this, the Axanar brief by Marc Randazza, which does use Klingon to point out that the Klingon language is not copyrightable. He used Klingon (in Klingon), along with English transliteration and translation in footnotes.

https://loweringthebar.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Paramount-v-Axanar-Amicus-Curiae.pdf <https://loweringthebar.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Paramount-v-Axanar-Amicus-Curiae.pdf>

Deirdre

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