• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

'Six Degrees Of Separation'

Excellent! :lol:

I used to have a friend who was an occasional friend of Michael Jackson. She met him and spoke to him on the phone a few times.

Hitler? Well, it's tenuous I know, but... I once met Buzz Aldrin years ago when he gave a talk at a US airforce base here in Britain. Buzz would have known Werner Von Braun, who I'm sure would have met Hitler.
 
I'd be impressed just meeting Buzz Aldrin...
 
Yes, it was just wonderful to have met one of the 20th Century's greatest heroes. I can honestly say it was exciting just to shake the hand of one of the few people to have been to the moon. Geek heaven!!!
 
It turns out I was at college with a guy who was one of the founding members of early punk band Zounds. This guy (Steve Burch) left before Zounds became known in the punk scene.
He never really talked about himself, so I've only just found this out by poking around on the Web.
 
Mythopoeika said:
It turns out I was at college with a guy who was one of the founding members of early punk band Zounds. This guy (Steve Burch) left before Zounds became known in the punk scene.
He never really talked about himself, so I've only just found this out by poking around on the Web.
Click to expand...

You just shook a memory for me!

I've been on holiday with Eden from Abrasive Wheels. He can drink! I only remember half the holiday :?
 
Now this is a surprising and very topical link:

Just recently I made email contact with someone I haven't seen for over 30 years, who is actually a London based CoE vicar. Tonight I got an email from him, in which he says he knows the 'cartwheeling verger' made famous after the royal wedding.

My correspondent says "I saw him this morning, and said, 'I hear you are in trouble'. He just grinned and said, 'Not really', but the news had a different story."

So I am one degree of separation from a world-famous cartwheeling verger! :D
 
'Six degrees of separation' theory tested on Facebook
Yahoo! and Facebook are to test the “six degrees of separation” theory and investigate how social networks are affecting how closely people are connected worldwide by updating a famous experiment.
7:00AM BST 17 Aug 2011

The pair are conducting an online version of the social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s small world experiment, which he began in 1967.
Volunteer “senders” will be given the details of a “target”, another of Facebook’s more than 750 million members, who they will not know.
The senders will send a message for the target to one of their friends, who will forward it to one of their friends and so on, until it reaches the target. Each link in the chain will be encouraged to pick the friend they think has the best chance of knowing the target.

In the original 1960s experiment, Stanley Milgram did the same with letters. He found that people in the United States were connected via an average of 5.5 others, which in part gave rise to the “six degrees of separation” theory in popular culture.

“You really couldn't have done this until very recently,” Duncan Watts, Yahoo's principal research scientist, told MercuryNews.com.
“It's a milestone, in terms of it's the kind of research question you can answer now that you could have imagined 50 years ago but that you couldn't have answered 50 years ago, or even 15 years ago.”

All Facebook users are being invited to participate in the experiment, which it's planned will lead to a peer-reviewed scientific study. The dominant social network also believes it could have commercial implications.
“Facebook depends on its connectedness, and the fact that users are connected to each other and users are connected to brands, enables the diffusion of important messages, a big part of which is our advertising platform," said Facebook’s chief data scientist Cameron Marlowe.

A game loosely based on the “six degrees of separation” theory and the small world experiment has also thrived online. In “six degrees of Kevin Bacon”, players have to link any actor to Kevin Bacon in as few steps as possible.
The game is thought to have been popularised on newsgroups, beginning in 1994 with a post entitled “Kevin Bacon is the centre of the universe”. IMDB, the film database, now lists each actor’s “Bacon Number” alongside their credits.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/f ... ebook.html
 
Spookdaddy said:
Zilch5 said:
Anyone done six degrees to Adolf Hitler yet?...
Click to expand...

As a young hairdresser my mum used to do the Duchess of Devonshire's barnet. The youngest of the barking Mitford sisiters, she had met Hitler in Munich when she was 17.

As a rugby fan I'm slightly prouder of this connection: As a child in the 1920's my dad kicked a ball around his village square with Prince Alexander Obolensky, after his family had arrived in England having fled the Russian Revolution. Obolensky scored two tries in his debut which culminated in England's first ever victory over the All Blacks.

There's footage of one of the tries here. (Strangely, neither the players, or what you see of the game itself, look as dated as similar footage of football matches from the same period.)
Click to expand...

In conversation with my mum yesterday I discovered rather a cool irony in the Mum/Mitford/Hitler connection - in that the hairdressers that my mother worked at at the time was named Churchill's.
 
A cousin of someone I chat to on t'internet created the opening titles for The Walking Dead. Cool, eh? :lol:
 
Seems that the 6 degrees idea is now out of date -

The New York Times: Separating You and Me? 4.74 Degrees

Using Facebook, resarchers found

that the average number of links from one arbitrarily selected person to another was 4.74. In the United States, where more than half of people over 13 are on Facebook, it was just 4.37.
Click to expand...

Anyway, I recently realised that having done a college course with someone who worked for Gerry and Kate McCann, I'm only a couple of degrees away from Madeleine. Oh, and the Pope, and Oprah.
 
That's just the diameter of Facebook, which is a much more connected group than the world population. For a start, they're all on Facebook.

The population of Facebook is still less than a billion (and arguably much less than the 500 - 750 million they've claimed), and people are quite likely to have in their friends list people they've never actually met.

So six degrees (roughly) is still current, at least in terms of people you've met/shook hands with/eaten a meal with/starred in films with depending on the definition being used.
 
Y-y-you mean it's just as we feared? People on the internet don't count?!
 
Rumbled! :lol:

*disappears in a puff of slime*
 
What's more, I've heard some people don't even use their real names...
 
gncxx said:
Y-y-you mean it's just as we feared? People on the internet don't count?!
Click to expand...

Not even if you meet them on there, and marry them? :lol:
 
People they can change categories, they're not fixed.

btw I hear that Skryllex destroyed Scandinavia and the mothership lands in UK this weekend. (inside source)
 
Last night I watched this:
The Fisherman's Apprentice with Monty Halls - Episode 1

Marine biologist Monty Halls travels to Cadgwith on the south coast of Cornwall to live and work as a fisherman, to find out what's involved in getting seafood onto our plates.

Cadgwith on the south coast of Cornwall is one of the last traditional fishing coves in the UK. Small boats are launched off the beach as they have been since Medieval times. Marine biologist Monty Halls travels down to Cadgwith to live and work as a fisherman, to find out what's really involved in getting seafood onto our plates. As his apprenticeship continues, he learns more about the situation facing our traditional fishing fleet.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... Episode_1/
Click to expand...

Now Cadgwith is not very far from here as the seagull flies, but it's a long haul by public transport, so I've only been there once, and that was nearly six years ago.

But the name of the fisherman Monty was working with, Nigel Legge, rang a bell with me. When the programme mentioned that Nigel ekes out his fishing income by making traditional crab pots and painting nautical pictures, I remembered the connection: the chandlery where I worked until a few years ago was one of the outlets for his work. So I've sold his stuff, and I may even have spoken to him on the phone.

So that links me with Nigel Legge, Monty Halls, and numerous BBC people!

What's more, this pic I took at Cadwith shows Nigel's boat, the little red, white and blue one on the left:

CadgwithFVs.jpg


Edit: The boat's called Razorbill:

Razorbill.jpg
 
Have probably mentioned this before but it's topical now:

Used to do homecare years ago and one of my jobs was putting a lively elderly lady to bed. I'd just make up her hot water bottle, walk behind her up the steep stairs and tuck her in. Smashing old bird she was, very independent! Always pleasant.

Anyway, she told me lots of interesting stories about her life. One was about her father in law, who'd been a twin. The two brothers decided to make a new life in America. Yes, you've guessed it, they booked passage on the Titanic.

Unfortunately, they got so drunk the night before they sailed that one missed the ship and couldn't catch up, and was left behind. His brother was lost in the disaster. The remaining brother stayed behind and married and had a family in Britain instead. So, here I am, a few degrees removed from a Titanic victim!

I can't be the only one here, so who else has a Titanic connection?
 
escargot1 said:
Unfortunately, they got so drunk the night before they sailed that one missed the ship and couldn't catch up, and was left behind. His brother was lost in the disaster. The remaining brother stayed behind and married and had a family in Britain instead. So, here I am, a few degrees removed from a Titanic victim!

I can't be the only one here, so who else has a Titanic connection?
Click to expand...
My grandad's family are from Southampton. His dad applied for a job working as crew on the Titanic and was turned down. Lucky for us that he did as my grandad wasn't born till a few years later!
 
Google, six degrees and Kevin Bacon

It is the party game beloved of cinephiles everywhere, one which rewards detailed knowledge of the career of one of the finest actors never to receive an Oscar nomination. And now it is even easier to play: Google has built Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon into its search system.
Click to expand...

etc
 
Remember at last year's Glasto, when some senior member of the Conservative Party died of a heart attack on the Sunday night in the Pyramid Stage latrine block? I was walking past that block on the Sunday evening when suddenly my stomach churned and I had to walk knock-kneed to the latrines in a hurry. It pains me to think that the last thing on Earth that poor guy heard might have been me doing a Sunday Glasto Special.
 
zarathustraspake said:
Remember at last year's Glasto, when some senior member of the Conservative Party died of a heart attack on the Sunday night in the Pyramid Stage latrine block? I was walking past that block on the Sunday evening when suddenly my stomach churned and I had to walk knock-kneed to the latrines in a hurry. It pains me to think that the last thing on Earth that poor guy heard might have been me doing a Sunday Glasto Special.
Click to expand...

Pity you didn't do it on him.
 
Zilch5 said:
Anyone done six degrees to Adolf Hitler yet?
Click to expand...
I'm maybe at a loose end and bored, this afternoon; but I happened on this thread, and the Hitler question as above.

I can claim to get quite close, on this one. An uncle of mine (mother's brother, born 1916, died a few years ago) was an engineering apprentice in the 1930s, and in the course of his apprenticeship, had a placement for some months circa 1935, in Germany. He mentioned in a letter home, having been in the course of his duties, at some kind of trade / technical fair, IIRC in Leipzig. Hitler, then Chancellor of Germany, attended this "shindig"; my uncle wrote in his letter home, "at this function, I saw Hitler; but I don't think he saw me."

So I can boast of having spent time over many years, with someone who was once in the same room as, and set eyes on, Hitler.

Another relative of mine, told a story of -- I think, the sort of thing of "he knew somebody who knew somebody who told of the thing happening to them": anyway, the lady with whom the story originated, was German, and in her youth met Hitler at a social function, circa 1930. Brief conversation --

Hitler: "Do you know who I am?"

Lady: "I'm afraid not..."

Hitler: "But you will."
 
amyasleigh said:
Hitler: "Do you know who I am?"

Lady: "I'm afraid not..."

Hitler: "But you will."
Click to expand...

Chilling! Brrr... :shock:
 
Risking getting into trouble for bad taste -- if the lady concerned had been Jewish (I gather that she wasn't), and had, in whichever way, managed to survive to 1945 and beyond: a great black-humour opportunity re one-sidedly continuing the exchange -- "Oi veh ! Did I ever !"
 
Today I met a man who, many years ago, dropped in to an old friend's local in Lancashire.

As he sat in the pub quietly supping a pint, his friend said 'See that barman? Go and ask to shake his hand, he'll love it!'
The bloke went to the bar and greeted the barman. The barman seemed pleased to be asked and happily shook his hand.

The pub was the Help the Poor Struggler, and the barman was actually the landlord, the former hangman, Albert Pierrepoint. :shock:

I have mentioned Pierrepoint before - my mum's friend's auntie was his cleaner, or something. This bloke was much more interesting though. I shook HIS hand. 8)
 
I have mentioned Pierrepoint before - my mum's friend's auntie was his cleaner, or something. This bloke was much more interesting though. I shook HIS hand. 8)[/quote]

After graduating my first job was in a dole office. A colleague had guarded the Nazis awaiting execution in Nuremberg and became a friend of Pierrepoint. He was corresponding with his widow into the 1980s.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top