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.