Do You Know These People?
Dear Sister Alma Rose Is this Six Degrees of Separation thing a bunch of crap or what? –Cynical in Cincinnatti
Dear Cynical — Sister Alma Rose is the wrong person to ask. She knows everyone. Why don’t you check it out?
Assuming you live in the U.S., pick someone at random in another U.S. city, get a few innocuous facts about that person (profession, alma mater, for example), shoot off an e-mail to someone of your acquaintance who lives in the area, shares the profession or the alma mater — do the best you can, and ask that person to do the same and copy you on subsequent e-mails, and see how many people you have to go through to reach that person.You realize, don’t you, that, as Sister Rose said in an earlier blog entry, We re all family, according to Guy Murchie, who claims you have at least a million relatives as close as tenth cousin, and no one on Earth is any further removed than 50th cousins!
Sister Alma Rose Has the Last Word 