Six Degrees of Separation

This from Don deYoung in the latest Creation Matters (Vol. 17(4), July/August 2012, p.5) (see www.creationresearch.org):

“Many mathematical truths are surprising and several counter-intuitive examples follow.  To begin, every person on earth connects with every other person through a chain of about six mutual contacts (with some exceptions).  This means that friends of friends of friends of…, through six levels, will include the entire earth’s population of seven billion.  This truth was verified in a limited test using e-mail contacts (Klarreich,2003).”

The conjecture dates back to at least 1929 (with Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy), and was the subject of sporadic sociological research for the rest of the twentieth century, becoming virtually synonymous with the “small world” phenomenon.  It hit popular culture in a big way in the 1990s with John Guare’s play and the college student spin-off, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

For the email study mentioned, see here.  Since 2003, there have been other studies using the emerging social media platforms - Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter - confirming similar degrees of separation (see the Wikipedia article for references).

As Don de Young notes, 

“The implications are many. On the practical side, through the phenomenon called the “strength of weak ties,” people often find new job opportunities through distant acquaintances rather than closest friends. In evangelism, consider that each person on earth is just six-persons removed from knowing every other person.”

And for truth activists like me and my wife, it gives us hope that we can indeed reach the whole world, even though from time to time it seems that no one is listening…

The Value of Monastic Life

In Challenge Weekly this week (22 August 2011), John Massam, writes in his Publisher’s Letter:

"I was brought up in a tradition that classified involvement with “worldly things” like competitive sport, the media and the world of arts and entertainment as something Christians should abstain from. The idea reflected the injunction that good Christians should be “separate from the world”… What I have come to realise is that Christians cannot cocoon themselves in cotton wool, be imprisoned in a monastery or live in a self-perpetuating community on some idyllic Pacific Island.  Our calling is to live in this world, whether it is as a professional sportsperson, a talkback host, a top-billing musician, a model or newspaper publisher, so that people know we are different.  Different but not peculiar.  A person to be respected, but not ridiculed." (my emphasis.)

La Grande Chartreuse Monastery

Now it is OK that John has had an epiphany and rejected the puritan standards of his upbringing, but he goes too far when he gratuitously impugns centuries of monastic tradition.

Firstly, monks and other religious are not “imprisoned” in monasteries and cloisters: they stay there of their own free will, dedicated to their God-given vocations.  It has been said that if God means for you to enter religious life, no one and nothing will keep you out, while if he does not mean for you to stay in religious life, no one and nothing will keep you in.

Obama and Ondimba: An Uneasy Meeting

  President Obama of the USA has taken some flak for meeting with President Ondimba of Gabon this week.  I can imagine that there would have been some tension and embarrassment in the room, but it would not have been on Ondimba’s side.

President Ondimba of Gabon

  Gabon is a majority Catholic country.  President Ondimba converted to Islam with the rest of the family when his father, then-President Omar Bongo, converted in 1973.  However, the country still promotes the Culture of Life, since this is foundational to both the Catholic faith and Islam.  As a consequence, both contraception and abortion are illegal.

  The contradiction one sees is that President Obama, who claims to be Christian (while a few conspiracy theorists suspect he is Muslim), presides over and promotes a Culture of Death in America.  Since he took office in January 2009, President Obama has been responsible for the killing of over 2.8 million babies in the US.  This amounts to almost twice the population of Gabon – including a disproportionate number of African-Americans, some of whom are descendants of the Fang tribe, which makes up about a third of Gabon’s population.

  Thus I can understand why President Obama would only allow still-photographers into the meeting.  He didn’t want anyone recording President Ondimba asking, “What are you doing to my people?”

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  Gabon is a West African country, with an area about the same as New Zealand (or the state of Colorado) and a population of 1.5 million.

Related Links:

President Obama invites controversial president of Gabon, Ali Bongo Ondimba, to the White House (NY Daily News) Slave Trade and African-American Ancestry

NZ Government Policy Inconsistency #237

Consider two families: one has a two-year old girl with Down Syndrome, and the mother is pregnant, the other has a normal two-year old and the mother is also pregnant. The mothers both have antenatal screening tests. The first mother is expecting a normal child; the second mother is told that her child has Down Syndrome.

It is typical in New Zealand for the mother in the second case to be offered an abortion by their doctor or midwife.  (Although New Zealand law does not permit abortion on demand, the High Court has found that the statistics on abortion approvals indicate that that is what we have in practice.)

However, in the first family, we don’t allow the mother to kill her child with Down Syndrome and keep the normal one that she is carrying in her womb.

Why the difference?

The National Screening Programme which identifies unborn babies with Down syndrome is promoted by the Government as the “Quality Improvement Programme”.  If the Government is really serious about “improving the quality” of the New Zealand population by getting rid of people with Down Syndrome, why is it restricting the programme to the unborn?  Is Health Minister Tony Ryall too squeamish to send the men in white coats round to the IHC?  No; he just realises that New Zealanders are not ready (yet) for the culling of 2-year olds, 22-year olds, or 42-year olds.  But unborn children? No problem!  That doesn’t create even the smallest blip on the media radar.