One Degree of Separation: Difference between revisions
Rescuing 1 sources and tagging 0 as dead.) #IABot (v2.0.8.7
Looney Toons (talk | contribs) ("comics"->"comic books") |
(Rescuing 1 sources and tagging 0 as dead.) #IABot (v2.0.8.7) |
||
Line 190:
* Try playing the handshake game - pick a person, and work out how many people whose hand you have shaken, or had similar interactions with, that it would take to connect you to that person. It's usually not a great deal more than [[wikipedia:Six degrees of separation|six]].
* The paper suggesting that everybody is connected by no more than 6 degrees of separation is well known, but this troper is fond of a story connected to it. Professor's giving a presentation on it, and says that everybody is connected to everybody else by 6 degrees of separation. Joker in the back stands up and asks for the chain from the professor to Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia. Professor stutters that it doesn't quite work like that, when a gentleman in the front row stands up and says that he knows Haile Selassie, and he knows the professor. Two links in the chain. The joker sits down, properly chastened.
* The professional sports version of this is a [https://web.archive.org/web/20090114202608/http://hfboards.com/showthread.php?t=512065 Sillinger number], after journeyman ice hockey player Mike Sillinger. No player in the National Hockey League's more than 90 year history is more than six degrees from Sillinger, and at one point in the 2007-08 season, every single player in the 30 team league had either played with Sillinger or had a teammate who had played with Sillinger. It's commonly believed that you can connect Sillinger to [http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/blog/puck_daddy/post/Two-degrees-of-Mike-Sillinger-addiction-strikes-?urn=nhl,134080 Kevin Bacon] (here's how it works: Bacon was in "Sleepers" with Ron Eldard, who was in "Mystery, Alaska" with Tie Domi, who was on the Toronto Maple Leafs with Petr Svoboda, who was on the 1997-98 Philadelphia Flyers with Mike Sillinger), but in fact, the Petr Svoboda who played with Domi and the Petr Svoboda who played with Sillinger are [http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/pdisplay.php?pid=5272 different] [http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/pdisplay.php?pid=36981 people.] However, Domi was on the Toronto Maple Leafs with [http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/pdisplay.php?pid=3158 Eric Lindros] in 2005-06, and Lindros played with Sillinger on the 1997-98 and 1998-99 Flyers. Sillinger's Bacon number is 4.
* There is a similar chain-of-associations game for mathematician Paul Erdos. And just as with Sillinger and Bacon, there is an [[wikipedia:Erdős–Bacon number|Erdos-Bacon Number]].
* If you are in a career with a small enough population of occupants, especially one where said people often get shuffled around to different locations (say, if you are a specialist in a small enough career field in the armed forces), you quickly find that everybody seems to know everybody else.
| |||