I found this really interesting: I am reading The Tipping Point, the excellent first book by Malcom Gladwell. It is about social "epidemics," and how the smallest events or groups can make a huge impact--from the popularity of a brand of shoes to STD outbreaks. Anyways, one of the first things he goes over is the concept of a "Connector," or a person who knows a very large amount of people and is often the connecting point of more people than they know (for example, I met Person A through Person B, who I met in class with Person C, who met Person B from Person D, etc. So I could not have met Person A without Person D.).

He came up with this because of a sociologist (I do not have the book in front of me, so I cannot site his name) had a theory that people are connected in far closer circles than they believed. In order to prove his theory, he sent out around 150 packets to completely random people in Omaha. They were instructed to get the packets to a stockbroker in NYC. However, they could not simply mail the package to him, they had to pass it on to someone closer to NYC, and they had to continue it on. Shockingly, almost every single package made it to the stockbroker in six steps or less--and in something like 60 instances, the same person in NYC was the final person to hand over the packet to this stockbroker. From this experiment came the theory of "Six Degrees of Separation." The man who got the package those 60 times is the classic example of a Connector.

Anyways, this is pretty nerdy, I suppose, but I thought it was pretty cool that if it were not for a bunch of people in Omaha willing to participate in this experiment (even though all were skeptical, and many believed that it would take "hundreds" of degrees to get the package to this man in NYC), "Six Degrees of Separation" would not exist.