How many people in the USA share your name?

How many of me?

There are 315,828,172 people in the United States of America. If everyone in the U.S. lined up single file, the line would stretch around the Earth almost 7 times. That's a lot of people. The U.S. Census Bureau statistics tell us that there are at least 151,671 different last names and 5,163 different first names in common use in the United States. Some names are more common than others.

Four. I talked to the father of a young girl with my same name. It says 94% of the people with my first name are male which sort of surprises me. It is frequently male, but females have the name too.

Did Al Gore "create" the internet?

I was watching a parody of It's A Wonderful Life about the internet. It includes a misquote attributed to Al Gore about "inventing" the internet so I decided to look into whether he had any involvement in the internet. Snopes has an article which I thought was misleading. There are other pages talking about it but they seem to use this as an excuse to bash Republicans. I think the Truth or Fiction article is more accurate.

I realize that "invent" was not used in the quote. It seems like defenders of the statement are exaggerating the difference between "invent" and "create."

Here are two definitions of "create" from Dictionary.com: 1) "To cause to come into being, as something unique that would not naturally evolve or that is not made by ordinary processes." 2) "To evolve from one's own thought or imagination, as a work of art or an invention."

When referring to God believers say he "created" the universe, but we don't say "invented." Using the logic of Gore's supporters it would imply that the universe was already invented, but God nudged it in the right direction.

The phrase "creating the internet" implies involvement with the technology. I think a clearer response might have been: I helped to initiate the legislative process that allowed the internet to expand.

In the Truth or Fiction article it gives the history of the technology behind the internet and also says that Al Gore wrote articles praising the technology but often showed a misunderstanding about computers.

Wikipedia has an article on the subject called Al Gore and information technology.

David Allan Bromley, science advisor to President George H.W. Bush, "supported the expansion of the high-speed network which eventually became the Internet."