6 degrees of Separation?
During the COVID isolation phase there seemed to be a fashion of people issuing challenges to delve into personal histories for a number of days to follow a theme. I’m not going to do a multi-day epic but instead will (after some preamble) write about links with 10 people with whom I have 1 or 2 degrees of separation. The idea of this is that it has been proposed that by following links of personal connections everyone is no more than 6 links from any other person in the world. There has been some research on this using Linkedln and Facebook suggesting that everyone on those systems is linked by chains averaging between 3 and 4 links. So just add another 2 links to get people who are fortunate enough not to be on those systems. Random individuals I decided to try a small experiment of my own by generating random latitudes and longitudes (through EXCEL) and speculating on how I could link to a random person close to that point (as shown on Google Earth). ...