Category: Fun

The clans of Sweden

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Today is the National Day of Sweden. I thought that I should look at some statistics from SCB to see what surnames are more common in different parts of Sweden.

The result is quite interesting. The most common names seem to be dividing Sweden close to what used to be the old lands of Sweden. Eriksson is the most common name in Svealand. In Gothia, Johansson is the most common name in Westrogothia and Karlsson is the most common name in Ostrogothia. Near Stockholm (near the Karlsson-Eriksson border), Andersson is most common. In Scania and Blekinge that used to be Danish, Nilsson and Svensson are the most common names. In the island of Gotland the name Petterson is the most common.

clans of sweden

Clans of Sweden – Data from SCB – Blank map from wikimedia

Now we just have to figure out how the Westrogothian name Johansson became the most common name in the north of Sweden. 😕

Olivia Wilde at a San Diego Comic-Con panel for Tron Legacy in July 2010.

I ate X pancakes

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Today is Thursday, and on Thursdays in Sweden it is a tradition to eat pancakes. I ate 6 pancakes today. But this made me think about how many pancakes other people eat. So I googled, and this is what I came up with.

I ate 6 pancakes, You ate X pancakes?

I ate 6 pancakes, You ate X pancakes? Graph made using GD for perl.

Here we can see that eating just a few pancakes is the normal thing to do, and that eating two pancakes is the most popular thing to do. Then there seem to be some who use 10 as a big number if they have eaten a lot.

However, I thought I had to examine this further. So I continued checking number of google hits. As I expected, 20 was the next big number for those who wanted to brag about how many pancakes they ate. But then nothing happened until 33.

I ate X pancakes

I ate 6 pancakes, Olivia Wilde ate 33 pancakes. Graph made using GD for perl.

Why is eating 33 pancakes almost as popular as eating a few? The answer is that a lot of websites writes that Olivia Wilde (known from House and Cowboys and Aliens.) once ate 33 pancakes in 20 minutes.

Olivia Wilde at a San Diego Comic-Con panel for Tron Legacy in July 2010.

Olivia Wilde at a San Diego Comic-Con panel for Tron Legacy in July 2010. Image from Wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.