Six degrees of separation

When I started teaching a blogging class at my library I became fascinated with this concept. (Not as enchanted as I was with WYSIWYG – I mean how can you not be charmed by an apparently random group of letters that actually means something and is super fun to say out loud?)

Nevertheless “six degrees of separation” is a fascinating idea and I used it in the class to demonstrate the potential impact of the students’ blogs as well as the interconnectedness of humans – something that has perhaps grown exponentially since the advent of the world wide web.

You’ve probably heard of it, right? According to Wikipedia, six degrees of separation “is the idea that everyone is approximately six or fewer steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world, so that a chain of “a friend of a friend” statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps.” It was championed by Frigyes Karinthy in his 1929 short story, Chains and popularized by a play written in 1990 by John Guare, later turned into a film.

Various experiments have been conducted to try to prove the theory, both mathematically and socially, and while no definitive proof is there, the results tend to support it. And there is Network Theory, which looks at how networks form and work in society, not just in people’s social lives, but also in disease transmission, job searching, how the web works and so on.

Six degrees of separation seems to go along with the phrase “small world”,something we say a lot as in, “Man, it’s a small world!” and “What a small world, isn’t it?” So it’s not surprising that Columbia University embarked on a project they named“Small World” in order to test the six degrees of separation theory in cyberspace using email to send information to a friend, to pass to another friend, and so on in order to reach a specific targeted person in as few contacts as possible. This was similar to the snail mail experiment run by a psychologist in the sixties to test the theory. Although both experiments were flawed the results seem to support the six degrees idea.

As far as networks of any kind or many kinds go, we may be intimately connected to people around the world without knowing it, especially since we don’t know them! But when we talk about blogs the world is very, very big. Statistics show that the average blog is read by perhaps two dozen people - after all, there are billions of blogs on the world wide web. Hmmm, wonder if we could do an experiment with connecting people through the blogs they read? Would the six degrees of separation theory still hold or not?

If you want to read more, check out these websites:

http://www.c6.org/oracle/ The oracle of bacon at Virginia
http://oracleofbacon.org/how.php Kevin Bacon
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/video?id=2724092Primetime TV tests the six degrees theory
http://www.socialdesignsite.com/content/view/76/73/ Small World

That was my husband's answer when I suggested we create a blog together. A man of few words. Well, sometimes.

Why would I want to start a blog? That was the second thing he said.
I have to create one for the class I'm teaching.
You're teaching a class on blogging but you've never blogged before?
Yep.
Hmmm.
So, do you want to blog with me?
I can think of other things I'd rather do with you (waggling his eyebrows).
So you don't want to do a blog with me?
Nope.
(heavy sigh)

"The world's greatest achievements often happen on the edge of chaos" - Unknown.

Sort of like "Necessity is the mother of invention"?
As it turns out, no.
It's about good old radiation and uranium and government experiments - the Manhattan Project resulting in serious accidents that killed 4 scientists and critically injured others.

Manhattan Project: The Philadelphia Experiment : On September 2, 1944, a group of engineers, some civilian, some military, were working on an experimental facility at the Philadelphia Navy Yard when, without warning, it exploded. Peter Bragg and Douglas Meigs, both civilian engineers assigned to the Manhattan Project, were killed; five others were critically injured

In August of 1945 and again, in May 1946, two Los Alamos scientists were exposed to lethal doses of radiation while performing experiments to determine critical mass. These experiments, performed at the Omega Site, Los Alamos, were commonly referred to as "Tickling the Tail of the Dragon". Although several months apart, both accidents occurred on a Tuesday and both on the 21st of the month...and, both men died in the same hospital room at the U.S. Engineers Hospital at Los Alamos: Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. (Dolly-an) 1921 - 1945 and Louis P. Slotin 1910 - 1946

Slotin's death ended all hands-on critical assembly work at Los Alamos. We immediately started work on a remote control system with the critical assembly equipment and the operating crew separated by roughly a quarter mile. We had no more criticality deaths or injuries. Tributes, of all sorts, came in following Slotin's death

Broken hearted

On Oct. 1, 1980 the Enewetak people returned to their atoll to find devastation. Half of the atoll was uninhabitable due to radioactive contamination. The island of Runit was a dumping ground for radioactive waste. The main island of Enjebi was too contaminated for the Enewetakese to resettle there. The native foods, integral not only to their diet, but to their culture and way of life, were either gone or too contaminated to eat. Where once was lush vegetation, banana trees and coconut palms, now was barren land. For hundreds of years copra - the meat of the coconut and source of coconut oil - had been a valuable trading commodity, with the Spanish in the 1600's, subsequently with the Germans, then with the Japanese.
Without the ecosystem that created and supported their lifestyle, the Enewetak people became dependent on imported food and developed health problems such as diabetes and heart disease. They no longer had the vegetation that had enabled them to produce canoes and matting, that gave meaning and activity to their daily lives.
Their beloved atoll, the heart of the people, was "broken".

"I love the way my atoll is, there where I was born"

In order for the United States to use the tiny Enewetak Atoll for its bomb testing, it had to relocate the native inhabitants. Their own memory of their people is rooted at Enewetak, the island was their home, their heart, their culture, their family. Their small society lived in peaceful isolation, each family group with its own piece of land that was passed down from generation to generation. The Enewetakese were the island and the island was them.

Chief Johannes will never forget the day in 1947 when the American Navy ship came to take them away: A man told us: "You cannot protest or fight. You are like the rabbit fish wriggling on the end of a spear. You can struggle all you want, but there's nothing you can do to change this."
From their exile on the island of Ujelang, the Enewetakans witnessed the detonation of Ivy Mike: Chief Johannes remembers the day vividly. "We were told to look in the direction of Enewetak. Those of us who did will never forget what they saw. First, a bright flash rising up from the water; then it appeared as though the sea had caught fire. A great, huge fire rose up into the sky and a noise was heard that was louder than any thunder.. . .What we saw caused us to worry about what was happening on our atoll, but we were told that we could not go there to see. Instead, we continued to wait."

They would wait thirty years to go home.

A Bomb by any other name......is still a bomb

Nectar, at 1.69 megatons, was a baby compared to most of the other hydrogen bombs when it was fired in the Enewetak Atoll on May 14, 1954 - the last one in the series known as Operation CASTLE. By contrast, "The Bravo event" of February 28, 1954, in the Bikini Atoll, was 15 megatons. They miscalculated the yield on this bomb which used enriched Lithium-6** and it turned out to be about two and a half times more than expected. Bravo was "the single worst incident of fallout exposure in all of the U.S. atmospheric testing program, scattered over more than 5,000 square miles of ocean and islands, resulting in the contamination and exposure of military and civilian U.S. personnel working on the shot, and people of the islands who were earlier moved to a supposedly "safe" island but received large amounts of radiation. Acute radiation effects were observed among some of these people." (from the Internet Archive.)


**The United States produced a total of 442.4 metric tons of enriched lithium from 1954 to 1963 for thermonuclear weapons, tritium production, and other purposes.

In the 1980's and 1990's some of the paperwork from the cold war was declassified: old films, letters, memos, reports. A lot of it is boring, and a lot of it feels like only part of the story - something's missing.....hmmm, guess that's what they mean by "sanitized" - a word the government uses quite often about these records.

I keep reminding myself that military and government documents use their own language, which if you try to analyze out of context can be misleading. I was the daughter of a career Navy man, so I understand that, but sometimes when I read these reports on the native islanders of the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls I feel a little sick.

On the lighter side

Besides the H-bomb, pestilence, strife, political upheaval, and natural disasters, there were also some good (or at least interesting) things that happened in 1952, such as:

The Treaty of San Francisco formally ended the occupation of Japan.
The first open-heart surgery was performed at the University of Minnesota.
UFOs over Washington D.C. were tracked on radar.
The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie opened in London.
Ann Davison became the first woman to sail the Atlantic Ocean.
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus recorded by 12-year-old Jimmy Boyd was released (it sold 3 million records.)
Christine Jorgensen had the first successful sexual reassignment operation.
Emmett Ashford became the first black umpire in organized baseball.
President Truman announced he would not seek reelection.
The Diary of Anne Frank was published.
Mount Sinai Hospital in Ohio was the site of the first successful surgical separation of Siamese (conjoined) twins.
Albert Schweitzer won the Nobel Peace Prize. "Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace."

You gotta love Wikipedia!