All Intensive Purposes

The Social Security Administration has a terrific site that lets you look at the popularity of different first names over time. This is the sort of vital data that lets smart people develop cutting-edge research like this graph of the number of boys (blue) and girls (pink) named Ashton in recent years:



The recent explosion of little male Ashtons is easy enough to explain, but what about the spurt of little female Ashtons in 1986? Odd.