What's in a name

We are approaching that blissful week between the end of final exams and the posting of grades. If you are afraid that you did poorly on a final or two, it may not just be the result of poor study habits: It turns out that your name may be to blame.

Supposedly, people whose names begin with the letter C or D are less likely to do well in school, according to a study reported in Yahoo! News. It's not that people with C and D names are less intelligent, but rather that people tend to be fond of their initials and therefore get less bummed out when receiving those letter grades. The conclusion was based on data from 15,000 graduate students over a 15-year period.

Strangely, the study doesn't say anything about people whose names begin with the letter F. I guess the researchers couldn't find any student that was okay receiving that grade.

The researchers also found that baseball players whose initials include a K – which is commonly used to denote a strikeout – are more likely to strike out than other players. For this part of the experiment, the researchers studied the data of 6,000 baseball players who were in the Major League within the past 93 years.

Frankly, more research has to be done on the topic before I'm willing to believe it. While there may be flaws in the data – such as its small sample size – it’s still an interesting proposition. I’m interested to see if the researchers will follow up this experiment and collect more samples.

The same study also found that people are attracted to words and objects that have to do with their names. The example provided in Live Science is that a man named Jack may be more likely to move to Jacksonville than a man named Phil, who may end up in Philadelphia.

By that logic, I should be fond of a former basketball player, a brand of almonds and a country in the Middle East. But sadly, I can't seem to pick out anything associated with my name that I particularly like.

However, I do usually get along with other people named Jordan, as well as other people whose names begin with the letter J.

Maybe those researchers are on to something.

But please, C and D named students, feel free to prove this study wrong and do well on your finals. Granted, most of you are probably done by now, but it’s worth a shot.

As for the rest of you, I guess you have nothing to worry about – at least until grades are posted.

Reefer Madness

As the semester comes to a close, I'm sure you're all looking for things to do. If you have snorkeling or diving gear – which you should, since we live in Florida – you can check out one of the most bizarre places I've ever heard of: the Neptune Memorial Reef off the coast of Miami. Yes, it's an artificial reef filled with dead people.

The reef is shaped like an ancient, underwater city but has the cremated remains of many deceased people in its columns and other architecture. I'm not sure why someone would pay a minimum of $1,500 to bury someone in the ocean when ashes can be tossed for a fraction of the cost. The only upside I can see is that this method won't get you fined for littering.

Anyway, the production of artificial reefs – with or without dead people – has become popular after the destruction of coral reefs by boats, erosion and, our favorite inconvenient truth, climate changes. Natural reefs are formed when coral, which is a sea anemone-like creature, attaches itself to a sea-floor rock. The coral then divides and conquers the area, and it becomes a massive living organism.

Given that coral takes a long time to grow, artificial reefs aim to speed up the process by giving marine plants a structure to grow on, instead of just waiting for the reef to take a shape of its own. Some of the world's reefs have been around for over 50 million years, according to National Geographic.

And you can't just make a reef out of anything. I'm sure you remember the reef made out of old tires that used to be off the coast of Broward County. Really, I don't see the appeal about a reef made out of 2 million tires, but apparently they thought it was a good idea in the '70s – then again, people in the 1970s also thought rocks would make great pets.

The problem with the tires was that they would be swept away during storms and strong currents. This would cause them to collide with and destroy existing marine structures, such as – drum roll – coral reefs. They also just looked like an underwater tray of doughnuts, which isn't that spectacular.

To get a tour of the Neptune reef – which should have been called Atlantis, after the famous sinking city – without having to dig up your scuba gear, click here to see a video of the cremation reef. I'm not sure why, but the video made me laugh. Maybe it's the music. Or that the fish look strangely out of place.

If you don't plan to venture out into the hot December sun but would still like to experience dead people, you can go see Bodies: The Exhibition at Las Olas from the comfort of air conditioning. Be careful, though: you might learn something.