Donut Age: America's Donut Magazine

It's a small world after all

I've signed up for the Small World Experiment being run out of Columbia University. The idea is to test the famous 6 Degrees of Separation (aka Kevin Bacon) theory by seeing how long it takes a message to get from you to a random stranger via email through a chain of friends and acquaintances. My first "target" is a homemaker in Sydney, Australia. Thanks to my knowing Adrian Miles, my message made it to Sydney in two moves and less than a day, but that, I suppose, was the easy part. It will be interesting to see how it fares from there. My second target is a stumper: a waitress in Nebraska. I don't know anyone in or from Nebraska. I don't, off the top of my head, know anyone who has been to Nebraska. I know geography is not the only link to go on, but I'm at a loss for other avenues as well in this case.

An interesting thing about this experiement is that it feels like a game. In fact, a comment on their chat board referred to it as such. Could it be that the experimenters made this project too much fun? I find myself strategizing how to get my messages to their targets. I find myself wantiong to try different, even silly approaches (such as sending to someone who lives as far away as possible from the target or who is particularly unlikely to be a useful link in the message chain). The results would be interesting to me, but perhaps not useful from an experimental standpoint.