Nice posting, rant?, about names. Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
And let me also draw your attention to this extremely interesting talk on “Face Blindness,” or the inability to recognize faces. A more serious case, suffered by 3% of the population, lack that ability to recognize themselves in a mirror! It was unclear how many people suffer from less serious versions of this; but even with 3% that’s approximately one in every school room. So we all know a lot of people who have this. I got to wondering what it must be like at the other end of this spectrum; is that another affliction?
All I can think about is xkcd’s Little Bobby Tables.
http://xkcd.com/327/
You can test yourself (not great if you use hair to recognize people though…)
http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/fgcfmt/fgcfmt_intro.php
I didn’t like the test, not at all. It seems like it is far to much a test of (a) you ability to do name recall, and (b) your familiarity with popular culture – over multiple decades. So I think it’s useless.
If they showed you a dozen random faces and then a series of another dozen and asked it they were in the first set that would probably be much better.