For today’s coffee hour may I suggest considering the metaphor: Six Degrees of Separation. -
Beyond the fold lets serve up our favorite beverages, There are cookies for everyone, and conversation. What is for dinner? How are you doing? And, What is on your mind today? This is a Open Thread / Coffee Hour.
The concept was first suggested by Frigyes Karinthy in his 1929 story "Chain-Links." And in 1990 was popularised in the play by John Guare called Six Degrees of Separation. -
American playwright, John Guare, wrote a play in 1990, and later released a film in 1993 that popularized it. It is Guare's most widely-known work. The play ruminates upon the idea that any two individuals are connected by at most five others. As one of the characters states, "I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it A) extremely comforting that we're so close, and B) like Chinese water torture that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection... I am bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people." Guare, in interviews, attributed his awareness of the "six degrees" to Marconi. Although this idea had been circulating in various forms for decades, it is Guare's piece that is most responsible for popularizing the phrase "six degrees of separation." Following Guare's lead, many future television and film sources would later incorporate the notion into their stories. Wikipedia