City Name Generator Update

While it has been a few months since I’ve turned my attention to the City Name Generator, I never forget about my longer term plan to ingest data from every country on the planet. Today, I expanded the list by adding nine additional countries: Belize, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Paraguay, Uruguay, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana.

The additions are smaller countries or ones that I just overlooked during the original build out of the generator. Most of them have fewer than 2000 identified names in the database. The first push was to get results for larger countries or those with many different town names available to maximize the database information. Now, I am turning my focus to smaller countries or those with a less dense population. After all, neither geographic stature or population density equate to interesting results.

Today’s update should fill in coverage for Central and South America. Next, I’ll turn my attention to Africa, Asia, or the Middle East. Or perhaps all 3.

Random Bank Names

What was once a habit of trolling for new ideas has slacked off of late. I blame summer for heat and distractions. Tonight, I overcame my typical summer lethargy to roll out a new generator: Bank and Financial Names.

The current database consists of a mere 14,000 entries. If it proves useful to others, I can easily expand by substituting city names with other results from the City Name generator. Country and country names are also plausible although I removed most of those from the default output.

In other news, I’m looking at a new hosting provider. Almost half the time I try to upload new content to the current host, it fails. Tired of dealing with their half-assed solution to the actual problem.

Adding a bit of Geographic Diversity to the Restaurant Name Generator

Added in some establishments from Chicago, Denver, Larimer County Colorado, Portland and El Paso. Unique name count is now up to nearly 70000 entries. I still need to purge the DB of what I find less than useful but its far better than what it once was.

Time to Eat: Random Restaurant Names

I’ve been trolling around for real business names for some time. Databases of actual business are available at crazy prices but I do one level for this hobby — zero cost. Thanks to data.gov I stumbled across a list of NY establishments — those inspected by the state. The data was a mess. Upper and lower case words, oddball combinations of words, strange abbreviations, and other curious combinations so I spent a fair amount of time cleaning it up. I also stripped out nearly 15000 entries related to schools or repetitious entries. More time at fixing the data could be spent but I wanted to roll out the full system before tweaking and tuning even further.

The resulting generator is the Random Restaurant/Eatery Generator.

I’d really like to merge some of the results with the Street Name and City Name Generators to expand the field exponentially. Until then, it will remain a whole lot of NY style names (both state and city). I like it thus far even if the data cleanup is incomplete.

A little Affliction cleanup

I reduced the overall data set for the . Frankly, portions of the database were overwhelming results that made little sense given the purpose of the generation system. I purged everything related to Cause and Supplemental Classification since that is perhaps a different form of the generator. Additionally, I removed all the pregnancy/child birth results. I feel they are far too limiting in nature for the general purpose.

Mostly, I just want wounds or diseases. The eliminated elements are not forsaken they just are off limits for the current approach. That data set has so many possibilities it may spawn independent facets down the roads. I must stare at it some more to conjure up ideas.

Afflictions/Diseases/Wounds

Afflictions, diseases and injuries. I’ve long wanted to produce a generator for those ideas and now I have. The results are based off the codes your doctor uses to categorize the problem. Not all are interesting. I’m finding that I like producing at least 5-10 results to down select what afflicts my person of interest.

Give it a try

Diseases

Sometimes you grab the wrong data set. Well, I do when exploring odd things available from government agencies. I thought I had a full set of diagnostic codes for injuries and diseases. Turns out, it’s a subset of the ICD focused on diseases only. I quit parsing the data. It would make a nice random table of some sorts but isn’t quite what I need.

Disease Listing by Category

Here’s what I managed. The full data is available from the U.S. CDC.