Mephisto
7th May 2007, 10:46 AM
A very close friend of ours (my wife and I) recently passed away and we got the unpleasant surprise by finding the obituary in a newspaper I don't usually read. She had succumbed to brain cancer after having once fought it before. She went through surgery and the subsequent treatments (Chemo, radiation, etc.) and thought she was finally cancer-free so our correspondence with her turned cheerful. We last heard from her around X-mas of last year when she sent photographs from her new home (she'd moved away in 2000 shortly before she contracted her first bout with cancer). She died on May 1st.
She and my wife knew each other professionally, but she quickly became a close friend. The reason I started this thread is that I'm very surprised at how tied together her acquaintances are to my wife and I, which is no real surprise considering she was well-known professionally (she had an M.S. in nursing and taught as well), but I'm also surprised at the people who responded to her guestbook obituary. We know a surprising amount of those people and not all of them are tied to the medical field.
Since the theory of the "six degrees of separation" was formulated in 1967, . . .
The late Stanley Milgram, a Harvard social psychologist, performed an experiment in 1967 to determine the extent of social networks in the United States. In his study, it took an average of six steps for a letter sent to a random resident of Omaha, Nebraska to reach a target person in Boston—using only personal contacts to form a chain. This was the origin of the “six degrees of separation” idea, but Milgram’s small experiment was hardly conclusive, restricted as it was to a very small sample size (and with all participants within the U.S.).
http://itotd.com/articles/222/six-degrees-of-separation
I was wondering what effect the internet and modern communicatons had on this theory. It turns out that it's also addressed in the link above, but I can't help but wonder if all of us here (at JREF especially) aren't tied to each other more closely than we realize.
Of course, I can attribute my philosophical musings to the death of a friend. These things always make us all more introspective. At any rate, I just want to say that I'm glad to have met with most of you, and I'm proud to be a member of such an enlightened group of skeptics. We may disagree, and we may argue, but when it comes down to it, we're all closer than we realize. :)
She and my wife knew each other professionally, but she quickly became a close friend. The reason I started this thread is that I'm very surprised at how tied together her acquaintances are to my wife and I, which is no real surprise considering she was well-known professionally (she had an M.S. in nursing and taught as well), but I'm also surprised at the people who responded to her guestbook obituary. We know a surprising amount of those people and not all of them are tied to the medical field.
Since the theory of the "six degrees of separation" was formulated in 1967, . . .
The late Stanley Milgram, a Harvard social psychologist, performed an experiment in 1967 to determine the extent of social networks in the United States. In his study, it took an average of six steps for a letter sent to a random resident of Omaha, Nebraska to reach a target person in Boston—using only personal contacts to form a chain. This was the origin of the “six degrees of separation” idea, but Milgram’s small experiment was hardly conclusive, restricted as it was to a very small sample size (and with all participants within the U.S.).
http://itotd.com/articles/222/six-degrees-of-separation
I was wondering what effect the internet and modern communicatons had on this theory. It turns out that it's also addressed in the link above, but I can't help but wonder if all of us here (at JREF especially) aren't tied to each other more closely than we realize.
Of course, I can attribute my philosophical musings to the death of a friend. These things always make us all more introspective. At any rate, I just want to say that I'm glad to have met with most of you, and I'm proud to be a member of such an enlightened group of skeptics. We may disagree, and we may argue, but when it comes down to it, we're all closer than we realize. :)