Stayed up till 2:00 AM on a school night to watch Jump Tomorrow on 4. It goes on my list of favourite movies ever.

Ah, and now I’m going to stay up for another half hour to watch Six Degrees of Separation:

How small has our world become in 2003? London filmmaker Lucy Leveugle tries to discover how many ‘degrees of separation’ lie between her and a nomadic Mongolian herdsman, Purev-Ochir Gungaa.

Lucy, with no backtracking, i.e. with the first person suggested by each contact, makes it in nine steps. Given that she got to Mongolia in four steps, it is highly probable that she could manage six degrees of separation through another route. The six-degree theory has been interesting to me for a while, but it has become more salient recently because I have joined Friendster, a site that networks you with your friends’ friends. I currently have 9 friends on Friendster who connect me to 8029 people, a number that has increased by 1000 in the past 24 hours. And yet Friendster only connects you to people four degrees of separation away. That means that the average number of new connections (let’s call it the social index: i_s) for all people involved is 8029^1/4≅9.5.

Quick calculation: knowing six billion people through six degrees of separation needs an i_s=6,000,000,000^1/6≅42.6. That means that each person needs to know on average 42.6 people unknown to the previous link. Comparing that with the i_s of 9.5 that can already be observed just with people who have joined Friendster, it sounds highly feasible. Anyway, join Friendster and give me more data!