Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. (Whatis.com)

Wayne Brown

In 1967 - reports Whatis.com - American sociologist Stanley Milgram randomly selected people in the mid-West to send packages to a stranger located in Massachusetts. The senders knew the recipient's name, occupation, and general location.

They were instructed to send the package to a person they knew on a first-name basis who they thought was most likely, out of all their friends, to know the target personally. That person would do the same, and so on, until the package was personally delivered to its target recipient. Startlingly, it only took on average between five and seven intermediaries to get each package delivered.

In 2001, a professor at Columbia University recreated Milgram's experiment on a much bigger scale, using an e-mail message as the 'package'. The data involved 48,000 senders, 19 targets, and 157 countries, Yet, amazingly, the average number of intermediaries was again six.

It's a startling thought: that, once we know his/her name, occupation and 'general location' (England, say), you and I can reach anybody on the planet we want to reach via no more than six intermediaries.
And that's the first fatal weakness of the NSA's illegal collection of the phone records of Americans (all Americans, if possible). The world's people - all of the world's people - are much too closely connected, in our time.

Computer-trolling through the NSA phone data for patterns - explains the NYT - is supposed to yield charts, 'with dots or 'nodes' representing individuals and lines between nodes if one person has called another'; the node with the most lines running to it ('like spokes around the hub of a bicycle wheel') is assumed to be the phone number of the central figure of any particular group. If the group is a terrorist cell, eg, such a phone chart is supposed to identify its leader.

The problem is, in real life it never works that way: no CEO's phone records are likely to yield more lines running to and from it than his secretary's. In fact, mere commonsense should tell the Big Brother types in the Bush Administration that, in an organisation like Al-Qaeda, the inverse is surely the case.

al-Zarqawi. if his phone had rung once too often, he'd have been captured long ago

It's the lowest-ranked terrorists - wannabees like Moussaoui, for example - whom you'd expect to be making and getting the most calls; the higher up the organisation you go, the more chary of phones the individual is likely to be. If, in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's phone had rung once too often, he'd have been captured long ago. As for bin Laden, it's well-known he never uses a phone.

But then, you conjecture, maybe the NSA sleuths know that. Maybe the 'nodes' they're focusing on are precisely the ones with the fewest lines running to and from them.

On the surface at least, that would appear to make sense: someone activating a sleeper cell in the US, eg - as the NYT points out - would probably only call its leader's number once.

But that's precisely where the likes of you and me risk being whisked off to Guantanamo in the middle of our saltfish and green banana. For which of us hasn't dialed or picked up to a wrong number - in fact, hundreds of wrong numbers, over the years?

Since the cell phone explosion in this country, there can hardly be a Jamaican who hasn't had the experience of answering his/her phone, and then standing there saying 'Hello? Hello?' while the dialing party is silent, or rudely hangs up, or merely goes on quarrelling with an invisible child at their end of the line, oblivious to the fact that their cell has just called your number.

(I once worried the hell out of my Trinidad-based daughter, and incidentally sent my phone bill through the roof. What happened was that, jostled about in my briefcase, my cell phoned her; was silent when she answered; was disconnected when she hung up; didn't answer when, recognising my number, she tried to call me back; and then, freakishly, phoned her again: same cycle again.

After that I activated the key lock. It's a nuisance, but it avoids your harassing people unintentionally. And keeps down your phone bill.)
And who's to say a wrong number we dial doesn't turn out to be an intensely watched number - leading to you or me, all unsuspecting, becoming a 'node' on an NSA chart featuring the phone number of Muhammed Atta's second cousin twice removed?

But six degrees of separation. Imagine that.
Besides, in many cases, it's much fewer than six. In his spoilt rich-boy days, eg (not that they're over) the current US president once ran a company partly financed by the US representative of Osama's brother. That's at most two degrees of separation between the ol' GWB and bin Laden.

Had they existed then, the NSA phone charts would have been humming with 'significance'.

After the Preakness

As horseracing aficionados know, Barbaro romped away to win the Kentucky Derby two weeks ago, with fully six lengths of separation between him and the second-placed horse. Assuming he won the Preakness at Pimlico yesterday (if he didn't, the rest of this section of this column is inoperative, and the reader may safely skip it), he'll probably be the first horse in 28 years to win the Triple Crown. (The last was Affirmed, in 1978).

Now, this sort of prediction has admittedly become commonplace of late. Between 2002 and 2004, War Emblem, Funny Cide and Smarty Jones all won the Derby and the Preakness, only to have their Triple Crown hopes dashed by the mercilessly yawning homestretch in the mile-and-a-half Belmont. The difference is, they were the offspring of sprinters, while Barbaro's sire is one of America's leading sires of staying thoroughbreds.

The most impressive thing about Barbaro's Derby victory was the splits. There were some very fast horses in that 20-horse line-up, and they took the field through the first quarter in a suicidal 22.63. That's the kind of speed that destroys a chasing pack; so that, almost invariably, the winner of such a race lopes up from the rear at the end, not so much accelerating as with everybody else passing him 'going backwards'.

But Barbaro was right behind the leading pair on the first bend. By right, he should have died with them (they finished 16th and last, respectively). Instead, he ran the final quarter in a scorching 24.32, the fastest final quarter of a Kentucky Derby since the immortal Secretariat. And, like Secretariat, Barbaro did it without the slightest spur of another horse's challenge.
So, if he won the Preakness yesterday.

The need for faith

A letter to the editor once pleasantly slammed this columnist for being 'teleological and cavalier'. Frankly, I would have preferred 'empirical and disinterested' - though if my critic wished to fault, as tending towards a bastard philosophy, the tendency of a mind to sidle crabwise back from the bloody evidence to the airy angst, so be it.

I am not a mathematician and hold no chips for zero - nor for that prostrate sinuous sign by which we connote and sanitise the gurgling void of infinity. If there is no Meaning, I am not consoled by the news that I am acting at this very moment in a way the first amoeba would have applauded, had it hands.

I have found the pleasure of learning that the hair on my back and yours is hydro-dynamically curved to be a sadly diminishing perk. And though I may be 'a child of the universe', I do not wish to be the child of a universe that is as mechanistic and insane as the sea. I like to think I am none of those - nor one of the cosmos's prodigious prodigals, either.

In the end you come back to the need for faith.
This doesn't mean that like some docile Pavlovian pup one comes easily, salivating for the promised bone of immortality or even the interim powdered milk of good cheer.

To the contrary, you have to be dragged, intellect straining on its tether, from every last blasted heath of Imagination, blinded from the friendly stars of what you knew by the black sun of what you know you do not know. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury - including you, young man, morosely picking your nose in the back row - forgive this diatribe; we are tired.

Now, I don't know about you (vexed rhetorical flourish), but I first began to relax my grip on the buoyant theory of natural selection when I realised that it led (led, my foot! Hurled itself, rather!) into the idiot's cauldron of infinite possibility far too often to explain why it should continually keep popping back up all svelte and grinning, saying, 'Look, a gazelle!', or 'Look, a caterpillar!, or 'Look, a caterpillar camouflaged to look like a locust eating a caterpillar!', and never once, 'Look, a caterpillar camouflaged to look like a locust eating a caterpillar, but with a tendrilly protuberance ruining the whole dam' effect, alas.'

Infinite Possibility retorts huffily, of course, that in the fullness of time there were caterpillars like that, no doubt, but that they thusly blew their cover and were promptly eaten into extinction.
But then there was the beetle which dutifully carried not just a non-adaptive but an anti-adaptive mutation through seven subsequent mutations before it 'randomly' acquired the catalyst that turned that enervating drag into an energising plus.

And there was the butterfly which, having brilliantly camouflaged itself as a leaf, to the point of including two symmetrical 'rain drops' on its wings - rain drops so realistic they even refracted the lines running through them, as water would - next went and repeated those raindrops elsewhere, but without the refracted lines this time, thus ruining the camouflage; and all this in the name of what, if not of symmetry, beauty? Coitus interruptus? Inertial idiocy?

In fact, wherever I look I seem to see things blithely evolving past the point at which the dictates of fitness to the environment would have them stop. Instead, they go right on evolving, towards some ultimate refinement of what Plato would have called the idea of themselves; towards, in a word, beauty.

Symmetry, beauty - and, yes, love; cf Keats, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' (he meant it, by the way): in ways too mysterious to articulate - or at least, for me to articulate - these seem to me both the prime mobile of our universe and immune to the fists of that tormenting brute, Time.

I finally pushed off from the consoling float of natural selection (and started sinking-or-swimming) when I saw it condemned us all to the prison of linear Time - whereas I know, and you should, that Time is as porous as the US-Mexican border, and quails completely when The Shining comes.

'Oh, but hold on now, do we really know that?' (Nasal mutter from the coiffed matron in the lilac suit.)
Well, as I say, I don't know about you, Ma'am. Immortality may be selective - think on that, Ma'am! - but, speaking for myself, on a matter with which I have some intimacy, if only of the inter ganglia variety.'

'Here a heckler asked' - this, from Nabokov's Ada - 'with the arrogant air of one wanting to see a gentleman's driving license, how did the Prof reconcile his refusal to grant the Future the status of Time with the fact that it, the future, could hardly be considered non-existent, since 'it possessed at least one future, I mean, feature, involving such an important idea as absolute necessity.'

'Throw him out. Who said I shall die?'
None of this should be construed, by the way, to mean that our columnist, after half-a-lifetime spent wandering in Science's enchanted wood, is now back with both feet safely planted on the high road to heaven. Let not those great multinationals, the big religions, waste their empty envelopes on my mailbox.

Let that modestly attired couple, knocking on my gate to enquire whether they could have a moment of my time, beware: my Rott-Dobes are very bad. But the wagons of science stop at the shining fjord, the quasars exultantly sail to no end.
And at this point I hear my favourite reader (the young man morosely picking his nose in the back row) say, suddenly irritable: 'Come to the point nuh Brong!'

But there's no point, kid - sic! Our columnist has had enough for the nonce of Bomber George and Torturer Dick (and Condi flying high in her black boots and sexual prime, bestriding the world like a.w-e-ll. What's the zeppo there, Jack Straw?).

And thought instead to put six degrees of separation between him and them, and rehearse for that golden interregnum by writing one of those 'abstract' pieces which good boyscouts have repeatedly counselled him to desist from forever.writing as some monastic man, in olden days, would walk and pray an hour at eventide, stopping from time to time to lift his eyes from the Good Book and peer about him, in diminishing light.

The Audacity of Art

Marjorie Whylie to receive Stella Gregory Award

Traditional Thanksgiving offerings at EVITAS