US utility patents granted

American patents and American babies named Loki, both becoming more common. There is a household somewhere where Dad just filed a provisional and Mom just registered the birth. The kid will grow up under a slightly heavier branding burden than the patent.

US utility patents granted grew from about 185,000 in 2008 to over 350,000 by 2022 as software, biotech, and Chinese-applicant filings expanded the corpus. The Loki name became a noticeable Social Security baby-name entry after Tom Hiddleston's character debuted in Thor (2011) and Avengers (2012), with the count rising further during the Disney+ series in 2021. Both are products of the platform decade: patents from a globalised innovation pipeline and baby names from a globalised entertainment one. Two completely different sources of supply, both lifted by the same broadband-and-cloud era.

The streaming decade and the patent decade produced their own children. Different surnames, same era.