The scarcity of a Levell

2011-10-03T06:53:00.000-07:00

Throughout my entire life, I’ve never met another Levell that I didn’t already know. Nor have I met anyone who knew another Levell either. There aren’t apparently any famous Levells. To my knowledge there isn’t a film starring one of us, nor are there any sporting heroes, scientists, politicians or other public figures.

Apart from Michael Le Vell, the actor who plays Kevin Webster in the UK’s longest running soap opera Coronation Street, who was actually born Michael Turner but used his mother’s maiden name written with [from my point of view anyway] a rather jarring space, the surname seems to me to be quite rare.

And I quite liked the sense of uniqueness that it bought.

Neither of my parents, nor my grandparents from Dad’s side knew of other branches of the family either, but whenever I’d get asked by a shop assistant for my name (as a way to find my details in their database I assume), and I’d reply, “Oh, it’s Levell, that’s Ell, Eee, Vee, Eee, Double Ell.”*

They’d reply “and your first name?”

“Gary” I’d reply. And then they’d found me.

* You probably do something similar to ensure that they get that all important twin letter at the end, don’t you?

I always assumed that they needed a first name (or at least an initial) and surname for their computer to work.

I’d even googled myself in a fit of egotistical madness one day to see what the internet knew about me. Precious little I have to report, and apart from another Gary Levell living [happily I hope] in America, there wasn’t anyone else.

That is until recently when I starting thinking that this might mean that my surname wasn’t that rare at all and that shop assistants needed my first name to help distinguish me from the other Levells in their system.

How very odd! Especially when the one of the shops in question was the small hardware one in my village! Did that mean that just around the corner was an undiscovered relative? How exciting! Obviously I couldn’t just get the details from the shop assistant … that would be an invasion of privacy, or would be protected under the Data Protection action, wouldn’t it? And besides, how would it make me appear. I mean, I’m not that kind of guy.

Then, the other day, munching my lunch, I typed “Levell” into the find box on Facebook.

Well, I got my family listed obviously and thought that was it, except for an innocuous little button at the bottom of the page entitled “Find more results”.

“What the heck”, I thought. “Can’t be that many”,

But was I wrong. Badly wrong. So badly wrong that my emotions went through interest, amazement, incredulity to downright, utter stunned silence.

There were pages and pages and pages of us, and not halfway around the planet either; in the same town, in places that I’d lived [and hopefully not my illegitimate offspring!], even a fella with the same first name too. Gary. Perhaps it was my alter-ego I have previously found, but no. It was another one!

I started to play a game as I was scrolling through them. How many Garys were there, and Kates (my wife, although she came by the name by graciously agreeing to marry me), my brothers and sisters, kids? After a while I gave up. It was too daunting. And would have taken me an eternity!

And this is just with the people who can be bothered to register a Facebook page.

And that’s why I’m writing this. To understand why we’ve not met or heard of each other.

Every time I go to a new place I’m always bumping into people that I know, even if it’s 11 hours away by plane. Kate & I laugh about this. How can people get away with having affairs? I’d get caught within 10 minutes. Not that I plan to do this you understand, but my intuition is that I ought to have at least heard of you!

You know the old saying that you only need to know seven people to know everyone, don’t you?

Well if you do just a little bit of mental arithmetic [don’t worry, you don’t have to ‘cause I already did it], you rapidly realize that the seven people you know can connect you to six others [don’t forget that one of their seven connections is you!], and so on. Before long (actually just eleven connections), you can potentially ‘know’ so many people that there aren’t actually enough humans on the planet to actually have that many connections with. That’s just 11 connections.

Anyway, that’s if you know just seven people, now, at this moment in time! What if it was more than seven, what if you grew up in classes of 30 other children through your education years, what if you have interacted with thousands of people in your jobs and had the best part of 45 years to meet people? What then?

And in all that time, you’d not met a single Levell nor had anyone mention that they personally knew, or knew of someone sharing our unusual name.

Armed with that thought I have done some thinking (and probably have failed) to work out the probabilities.

I estimate that there were over 600 Levell’s that I saw with a Facebook account. This would set our scarcity at 1 in 10 million if Facebook were representative, but it’s not. A quick bit of research over at http://www.britishsurnames.co.uk/surnames/LEVELL shows the scarcity to be 7 in million. So, still quite rare then, but if over 20 years, I have met 1000 people and in the same time those 1000 also met a different 1000 people, I could connect to potentially 1,000,000 people, and since there are 7 people in a million who have our surname, simple logic dictates that I ought to have at least heard of 7 of you.

But only if my assumptions of the number of people I’ve met and they’ve met are accurate. And that this vast number of people could actually be bothered to play my egotistical game. If any of these assumptions is too generous or unreasonable, then I won’t have met you.

And indeed this does seem to be the reason. Perhaps the seven that I ought to have statistically heard about are in fact my own family members!

We are rare (and it obviously goes without saying - special creatures :-) !), but only just. If there were, say, twice as many of us, then we’d already have started meeting each other, at school, in work and so on, but unlike the Smiths and Browns who are forever encountering each other and dismissing it because it’s always happening, we’d perhaps be more like the Middletons, who at 448 per million will each have had a special moment once in their lives where they met a relative from an unknown (but probably accessible) branch of their family.

I’d like to think that we could too, so if you’re a Levell and you’ve stumbled upon this blog, drop me a line, it would be interesting to see how our family trees connect.

Startup post

2008-06-06T08:45:00.000-07:00

I've thought about having a blog for a while, but mainly the lack of anything apparently interesting to anyone apart from myself has prevented me from doing so. Having been unintentionally bullied by my youngest brothers' blogging, I felt the need to set something up, and though I might start with some thoughts

I've always been fascinated by computers being "useful" tools, and this is really what inpired me to come up with the design for Organizer back in the early 90's. Windows was young, computers had graphics, but nothing really amazing, and I'd been working with Mark Daymond on a Windows debugger and were we writing the help system. I wanted to make it interesting - lets face it a debugger is about as unchallenging (graphically speaking) as it's possible to get - and I came up with the idea of having the on-line help system look and feel the same as the real Windows reference guide.

It had pages that turned (with the little dog-ears), and tabs down the side, and (as I'm a little slow on the uptake) it occurred to me after some time that this could be used as the basis of a PIM - something that was much more appealing.

So... cutting a long story short, that was what I wrote. I joined forces with Ross Holman and Jules Looker who ran a forwarding-thinking software reseller who I'd known from my days at Microsoft and together we made a commercial product out of it.

Sometime in 91/92 we sold it to Lotus as they had a real chance of taking it global, and they did. It was ported to OS/2 and the Macintosh and translated into 24 (I think) languages.

I've had several thoughts about re-doing the UI for the Web, but it's almost a case of anyone can do it so why bother, but you never know, Silverlight looks like it might just be able to pull it off...

Oh, and now that I've started, I may well go back through my old code (yes, I've kept it all!) and see if I can get some screen grabs from the Observer days showing the evolution of the book idea...