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Re: It all fits together. . . (not otr, 6 degrees, kinda long,)
>ah, six degrees from kevin bacon has long been simply six degrees of
>separation from anyone you darn well feel like finding a connection with. (i
>just ended a sentence with a preposition, but it would sound too awkward to
>fix it.) try www.sixdegrees.com. you can connect yourself to anybody if you
>try hard enough.
Six gegrees, indeed! It's been proven & cited in a fascinating recent New
Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell.
We've all heard of the idea that it's a small world -- but Stanely Milgram,
the Harvard social psychologist who's the name behind the famous Milgram
Experiments of the 50s decided, in the late 1960s, to find out how small.
He had a singularly brilliant idea. (As do all the great scientists: figure
out the right question, and the answer will come.) He sent a sort of chain
letter to 160 random people in Omaha, containing the name and address of a
stockbroker in Sharon, Massachussets. He told them to write their name on a
list and send it to someone they know who they thought would get it a step
closer to that stockbroker, and so on.
Milgram reports that many people hypothesized that it would take somewhere
around 100 intermediate steps to get from these randomly selected people in
Omaha to the randomly selected man in Sharon. So it
was quite surprising, in Milgram's words, "to learn that only five
intermediaries will -- on the average -- suffice." In fact, so many took
only five or six steps that this experiment is the basis of that
often-cited statistic: there are only six degrees of separation between you
and anyone. Cool.
.......................................................................
paul soupiset
creative director
toolbox studios, inc.
san antonio, texas, usa
http://www.toolbox.net
.......................................................................
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