For many years I have felt close to Elvis Presley.
I knew an Indian writer who was friendly with a musician who had played in a band with someone who once flew in the same aircraft as a man who had shaken hands with Paul McCartney at a party. And Paul, of course, knew Elvis. That's six degrees of separation.
For over eight decades, it was thought that you could trace a connection to anyone in the world through just six people. Six and the City or The World is Six might have been a TV show or a book based on this had someone thought of it.
OK, so the six links may not actually connect someone in an Amazonian jungle to a semi-sage halfway up the Himalayas but six is a nice figure and good enough for all practical purposes.
Now scientists at the University of Milan have concluded that the actual figure is 4.74, not six. Trust the men in white coats to complicate a simple social (and sociological) fact with unnecessary decimals.
So maybe the friend of a friend of a sort-of friend didn't actually shake hands with McCartney at the party but merely brushed shoulders as one of them was waiting to get into the toilet while the other was coming out. Maybe that's how we lost the 1.26th of a contact.
4.74 degrees of separation doesn't quite have a ring to it and with social networking sites all over the place, how do we know it is not 3.92 or 2.8976 degrees of separation? Depends on who is doing the research.
What might be of greater interest is finding out how many people are needed to separate close relatives. I once had a distant uncle who came to visit and refused to leave. It took three people to evict him from the house - two friends and a passer-by who popped in to see what the noise was all about. We might have done it with 1.8 but the passer-by wanted to try out his new pair of boots on my uncle's derrière just for the exercise.
If researchers are not interested in how many people it takes to separate relatives, they can always work out just how many of our contacts are real friends and how many are merely virtual acquaintances, the internet's version of brushing shoulders at a crowded party.
Still, I am curious to know how they arrived at that intriguing figure of 4.74 degrees of separation. I mean, I'd hate to have .74th of a friend. In this I am a bit like George W. Bush - either all of a friend is with me or all of him is against me. Fractions can never be the basis of a strong friendship.
