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Science

Marvel Universe Is Almost Like *Real Life* Society 221

Posted by Hemos from the scary-as-heck dept.
TheMatt writes "Scientists at the University of the Balearic Isles have analyzed the Marvel Universe and found that it is almost like real society. The team studied the statistical properties of each character, the books they were in, and who else appeared in them (through resources like the MCP). While there were some similarities to real society, a close look revealed the artificiality. For example, the MU isn't very clustered, only 1.5x that of a random network; real life is about 10x more clustered. Of course, the realities of comics (the business) are why this occurs. Also, they found the most networked of all Marvel heroes was Steve Rogers, Captain America himself."
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Marvel Universe Is Almost Like *Real Life* Society More

Marvel Universe Is Almost Like *Real Life* Society

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  • so does that mean that the X-Men are like dot-com geeks? (powerful yet hated)
    • "so does that mean that the X-Men are like dot-com geeks? (powerful yet hated)"

      Ummm, no.

      You see the X-Men have funding . . . .

      ::ducks::
      • bah. forgot to say "like they _were_"
      • "so does that mean that the X-Men are like dot-com geeks? (powerful yet hated)"


        Ummm, no.


        You see the X-Men have funding . . . .


        Where do the X-Men get funding? Adventure capitalists?


        Man, if someone else said what I just said, I'd sure have to punch 'em!

  • Stories like this, on important social issues that must be addressed, are why I read slashdot.

    Why people are examining clusters in comics I don't know. Are they beowulf clusters of Marvel Superheroes? Or just load-sharing clusters of Marvel Superheroes?

  • yeah. (Score:2, Funny)

    by garcia ( 6573 )
    Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson know this first hand. They should have asked them for some research material.

  • Whewww!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Art_XIV ( 249990 ) on Friday February 22, 2002 @03:10PM (#3053350) Journal

    Now this is the kind of science that I can enjoy, especially after Book Reviews: The Skeptical Environmentalist

  • OMFG (Score:4, Interesting)

    by aardwolf64 ( 160070 ) on Friday February 22, 2002 @03:10PM (#3053357) Homepage
    While there were some similarities to real society, a close look revealed the artificiality

    I'm wondering just how much exactly they spent on this study just to find out that comic books are in fact based on real society? I think the only reason this would even be important to the slashdot community is to see how foolishly Universities spend their money. I could have told them that comic books contain artificial societies for only $100 probably saving them thousands...

    Any Universities needing useless information about comic books should make thier checks payable to aardWolf64, care of...

    • Re:OMFG (Score:2, Interesting)

      by FortKnox ( 169099 )
      I could have told them that comic books contain artificial societies for only $100 probably saving them thousands...

      I got you beat, in honor of Open Source, I woulda done it for FREE!

      You're right, though. How about putting that money into real research. Organizations like NASA get budget cuts while projects studying the Marvel Universe go on?
      Think about it!
      • Who can say what a real research is before we can find the final product?
        Who knows what applications or concepts can be extracted from what a research finds?

        Scientists do not research for profit, or for launching things in space or for making the big bucks.

        (and yes, it is THAT kind of thinking that got me choosing Physics over engineering, and now working for a call center, eating kraft dinner)

      • Bleh... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by drrobin_ ( 131741 )

        You're right, though. How about putting that money into real research. Organizations like NASA get budget cuts while projects studying the Marvel Universe go on?


        Well, first off, the study was done in Spain. Last I checked, NASA funding from Spain wasn't getting cut ;P

        Actually, though, all the outrage here seems kinda silly to me. What happened to the "Science for the sake of Science" mantra? This is exactly that.

        Yes, it doesn't have on-the-surface real-world applications. Reading comic books isn't gonna make a cure for cancer. However, it -does- have some economic value.

        Think entertainment. TV shows, computer games, books, comics. If I were creating one of these, I could benefit from this study, a LOT. Marvel comics are extremely successful, and they have a "clustring level" of about 1.5. I wonder what some of the failures have? Probably, a lot less. This is valuable, because gives me hard figures correlating success or failure of a venture with the reality level of its social networks.

        Even if it only increases the "reality index" of my entertainment products by 3%, that's significant. A universe which can be related to by my readers in inherently more interesting. If it's more interesting, then more people will buy my product, increasing my revenue, potentially by a lot.

        Plus, a bunch of scientists got to sit around reading comics :)

        ( unless, of course, the study was done by computer OCR of the comics, but still... gotta do something with them once they're scanned :D )
        • I am all for people doing "science for the sake of science"... as long as they do it with their own money. When they want to do it with my money (or public money that is forcibly removed from my pocket by taxation), then I expect to be listed as a co-author.

          If the authors of this paper did this without public funds, then that is wonderful. If they did it with tax dollars, then a lot of Spainards would be quite justified in being angry that food is being taken out of their mouths by their gov't to fund such illegitimate gov't activity.

          Science for science's sake is good.

          Science for the sake of getting a gov't grant to read comics is bad.

          I have no clue which this is.
    • TheMatt [mailto] writes "Scientists at the University of this place you've never heard of have analyzed Slashdot and found that it is almost like real society [nature.com]. The team studied the statistical properties of each user, the stories they posted in, and who else replied to their posts (through resources like the Slashdot archives). While there were some similarities to real society, a close look revealed the artificiality. For example, /. isn't very clustered, only 1.5x that of a random network; real life is about 10x more clustered. Of course, the realities of web boards (the interface) are why this occurs. Also, they found the most networked of all Slashdot users was CowboyNeal, the default poll choice."

    • Re:OMFG (Score:2, Insightful)

      by dwarfviking ( 561155 )
      I'm wondering just how much exactly they spent on this study just to find out that comic books are in fact based on real society? I think the only reason this would even be important to the slashdot community is to see how foolishly Universities spend their money. I could have told them that comic books contain artificial societies for only $100 probably saving them thousands...

      Well, the point of the research is: When you set up an artifical universe, with artifical character relationships, what networking properties emerge, and how, exactly, do they compare to the networking properties of the real society on which the artificial construct was based?

      The researchers probably don't give a flying fig about the Marvel Universe itself. It just happens to be a rich model (designed by someone else) which they're trying to use to figure out causes and principles of population interaction.

      Bjorn Christianson

    • Yeah, somewhere Stan Lee is laughing his ass off right about now at these researchers. Christ, call him up, he'll tell you all about how he (and others) conciously created their characters to mimic the real world. This has been a hallmark of Marvel comics for years, and is one of the major reasons they were able to make any progress at all against comic juggernaut DC.

      Shoot, just go watch Mallrats and find out all about it.
    • I'm wondering just how much exactly they spent on this study...

      Please, please, please tell me that money was diverted from an athletic program to fund this research.

      Poetic justice man.

      Poetic justice.

  • explanation (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by flynt ( 248848 )
    would someone please explain what the hell this write up means to me. it appears something to do with comics, which i don't read. any info appreciated. thx.
    • they looked at 11k comic books, and noted which characters apeared in each book. They then came to the conclusion, that comic books do not folow the same rules as real life. Their research also showed, that there was a corelation between the size of the group, and the chance of a specific character showing up.

    • Re:explanation (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Xerithane ( 13482 )
      Here's a translation:
      Marvel Comic book characters are modelled after real world social interactions. Such as Person A has Friend B who has a Friend C, at a 3rd degree of seperation. Person A is more likely to know Friend C, because of social clustering.

      All it is doing is showing a web of each characters connections and affiliations, similar to a six-degrees setup. Like Kevin Bacon. [virginia.edu]
  • Geeks United concluded "Slashdot Is Almost Like *Real Life* Society" with hot grits, Natalie Portman dreams, Beowulf clusters and no women...

  • Quote from the article (Score:4, Funny)

    by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Friday February 22, 2002 @03:12PM (#3053370) Homepage
    "It seems," say the researchers, "that Marvel writers did not assign characters to books in the same way as natural interactions would have done it."
    Sounds like we can say the same thing of university degrees in Spain.
  • What the hell happened to the Silver Surfer? ATTITUDE! The d00d had mucho attitude and attitude is what it's all aboot.

  • Not a good thing (Score:5, Funny)

    by fritter ( 27792 ) on Friday February 22, 2002 @03:12PM (#3053377)
    Also, they found the most networked of all Marvel heroes was Steve Rogers, Captain America himself.
    Unfortunately, this research was responsible for the incredibly boring "Apocalypse Protection" series, when Captain America just tried to sell insurance to other superheroes for like 10 straight issues.

    • Don't be silly (Score:2, Funny)

      by mblase ( 200735 )
      The entire superhero population of the MU is already blacklisted from all NYC-area companies providing auto insurance, home insurance, and fire insurance, while the life insurance companies are investigating about half of them for fraud in light of their various resurrections.
      • Not the entire superhero population is blacklisted. I happen to know that AquaMan has plenty of flood insurance.
    • Do you remember the series Damage Control [mac.com] about the people who cleaned up after superhero-related damage?
    • The best thing about Captain America: his voice on the Spiderman show was done by none other than David Hayter. If you don't know who David Hayter is, he did the voice of Solid Snake, and wrote X-men, and is basically my god.

      Colin Winters

  • What? (Score:1)

    by NWT ( 540003 )
    What is the Marvel Universe supposed to be?

    - Remember: there is no stupid question :)

    • Well you probably have already read some of the other comments (or, amazingly enough, the article itself) that would answer your question, but just in case, they are referring to the comic book characters that exist in comic books from a company called "Marvel" - Spiderman, Captain America, The Hulk, etc. (and not Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, etc. who are all from a competing company, "DC").

      I don't think it's always consistent, but for the most part, all of the characters in the "Marvel" group exist in the same imaginary "Universe" - they interact with each other (and in case it isn't complicated enough, they occasionally interact with characters from the DC "universe").
  • Now, if you will excuse me, I must go irradiate a spider and coax it to bite me.

  • Kevin Bacon not that connected (Score:5, Informative)

    by Erore ( 8382 ) on Friday February 22, 2002 @03:15PM (#3053401)
    The book, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference" has a couple of pages about networking. It mentions that a study was done to determine the connectedness of random people. It determined that random people can be connected within 6 links. Thus, 6 degress of separation.

    The Kevin Bacon stuff is just a game based upon the same principle. I don't remember his score exactly, but in Hollywood circles Kevin is like 665th on the list of connectors. He can be connected to other people in Hollywood within 4.x people. The most connected person is Rod Steiger, who can be connected in 2.1x.

    • Not to nitpick, but the "Center of the Hollywood Univerise" is actually Christopher Lee. Rod Steiger is second. Kevin Bacon rates #913.

      The Oracle of Bacon at Virgina [virginia.edu] is a great resource for this stuff.

    • The Tipping Point was published in 2000. From a random site I found on Google [detnews.com]:
      Enshrined in a popular play, movie and a game involving actor Kevin Bacon, the notion that disparate people are connected by a short chain of mutual friends caught on after 1967 research by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram.


      As you can see, Malcolm Gladwel(author of The Tipping Point) did not introduce this concept.
    • There has been some serious academic work done by many researchers into this field. I was lucky enough to be able to see Duncan Watts present [santafe.edu]his research in the Small-World phenomena a few years ago. While his talk starts out with a mention of the Kevin Bacon game, it continues into more serious areas, including the way the neural network of the worm C. elegans conforms to the small-world predictions and the connectivity of power grids. The implications into computer networks should be worth at least a few moments of thought to all of us.

  • I smell... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Vireo ( 190514 )
    I smell the smell of an IgNobel [improbable.com] prize in the air.

  • Woohoo! (Score:2, Funny)

    by dasmegabyte ( 267018 )
    Oh great, another of my dork hobbies goes legit!

    "Lady, I'm not 'wasting time and money on funny books,' I'm conducting an analysis of social interaction through the medium of networked vigilantism. Now pass that new issue of X-Force and refresh my strawberry sprite."

  • Damn them (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sri Lumpa ( 147664 ) on Friday February 22, 2002 @03:18PM (#3053434) Homepage

    All I see is that some bastards are paid to read tons of comics and do resume about them, which, to be scrupulously accurate, needs to be cross-checkes... by reading the comics again.



    Bastards

  • Missing something? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ThePlague ( 30616 ) on Friday February 22, 2002 @03:19PM (#3053441)
    Maybe I don't quite understand the research, but it doesn't seem that surprising that the Marvel Universe does not follow real-world clustering patterns: many of the characters have dual identities, which I would think throw off the usual associative relationship of friends.

    As an example, consider this scenario:

    Jane Goodcitizen is friends with Peter Parker.
    Spiderman is friends with Captain America.(?-don't know, but let's just say)

    In the real world, there would be a high correlation of friendship between Jane and Captain America, while the whole secret identity thing puts a monkey-wrench in the comic universe.

    The closest real-world model would probably be the network of say traveling salesmen or spies.
    • I think that a bigger cause is that the impetus for a character to appear in another's comic is not the fact that they have a mutual friend or connection (as in real life), but so that character can appear on the cover, attracting new readers (that character's fans) Add the fact that friendships between creators/artists/writers/editors of characters are more influential than "In Character" relationships.

      I mean, how often do comic books even worry about who-knows-who when writing cameos/cross-over issues? They always just happen to be in the same place or after the same enemy or something COMPLETELY random (Secret Wars, Infinity this-or that, etc.). I think it's cool they found the level of clustering that they did. I think they should conduct additional studies in which the real-life creators of the comic are included in the data.

      I also want to go to grad school in Spain now.
  • Really, has society gotten to the point where life is imitating art? I can see it now:

    2036 elections
    It has been 8 years since the city of New York has been renamed to Metropolis. The current primary elections for the United States President have been reduced to the following candidates:

    Al Gore
    Lex Luthor
    Stan Lee
    Edward Brock
    Strom Thurmond
    Jeb Bush
    Impossible Man
    Adam Warlock

    • Re:Adventures of THE MAN (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Society has always imitated art. It is the closest thing we have to gauging the collective unconciousness of a society as a whole. All major movements in art have been the culmination of a major shift in social psychology.
    • Y'know, I WANT to vote for Adam Warlock, because I really like him, but looking at his track record, you have to be skeptical that he's the man for the job. After all, he only seems to solve the problem of Thanos, but really it keeps coming back, like Saddam Hussein or something. Can he solve any problems, really, without having to hibernate in a coccoon for a couple years to find out the exact same problem is back?

      Though, having Puck in the White House would be cool. And I can just see Drax the Destroyer as Secretary of Defense!
    • Hmm...Lex Luthor appears to have crossed over from an alternate reality. 'Course, the residency requirements in the Constitution don't cover that sort of thing.
  • Also, they found the most networked of all Marvel heroes was Steve Rogers, Captain America himself

    Why not? He was the first major character (March 1941) that put Marvel, then known as Timely Comics on the map. He's simply had more time to network.

    Only Human Torch (October 1939) and Sub-Mariner are older.

    More info here [google.com] (Google cache only)

  • I can see some usefulness from this (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mblase ( 200735 ) on Friday February 22, 2002 @03:23PM (#3053471)
    - Marvel writers (and writers of other comics, book and television universes) begin clustering their characters more, instead of letting them encounter each other more or less randomly, to increase the subconscious sense of realism.

    - Software developers creating "artificial universes" apply the study to increase the clustering, and hence the underlying realism, of their creations -- for instance, Non-Player Characters in EverQuest or The Sims.

    - Practical implementation for Marvel: LAY OFF THE CROSSOVERS and let characters who know each other already keep in touch each other instead.
  • "But Aquaman, you cannot marry a women without gills! You are from two different worlds! ... My life has been wasted".

    ...worst...study...ever.

    Sorry, it had to be said.
  • While the comic book analysis seems useless, the more of our interactions are on-line, the more we can analyze them the same way. How connected are slashdotters compared to kuro5hin users? To WashingtonPost.com readers?

    There's a lot to be said for how modern society, and the internet, lead to the fragmentation of society. This methodology of this study could be a way to analyze how those fragments come back together again.

    (Also, I think secret identities are part of why the clusers are smaller in the Marvel Universe. Does Aunt May know Captain America? Doubtful.)

  • sheesh. Ok, I understand that this is quite nifty and all that. But for the life of me I can't figure out what this has to do with anything.

    Seems like a huge waste of .

    How the hell do you get funding for something like this? If you know, please tell me, I have an experiment to run to see if beautiful actresses enjoy sleeping with nerds (me). Of course, I would have to recheck my results many, many times.

  • another key difference (Score:5, Funny)

    by L-Train8 ( 70991 ) <Matthew_Hawk.hotmail@com> on Friday February 22, 2002 @03:28PM (#3053504) Homepage Journal
    A closer look reveals the Marvel Universe's artificiality. For example, social networks have a property called clustering... the Marvel network is only very weakly clustered - about 1.5 times more than a random network.

    Another example of the artificiality of the Marvel Universe is that there are a bunch of people with super powers in it, where as in reality, there are realitively few people who can shoot lasers out of there eyes or turn into a gigantic green monster when they are angry.
    • there are realitively few people who can shoot lasers out of there eyes or turn into a gigantic green monster when they are angry.

      Really? I just married one of the few that does it? Do I get anything extra for the fact that she does both when she's pissed?

      The skin on my backside used to be pretty pasty because, well, geeks don't get out much. Now its sort of tan after those close calls with the lasers. I still haven't had time to fix the hole in the concrete wall she made when I dodged her punch.

    • Plus, real people are only 6 heads tall, whereas those in the Marvel Universe are 7 or 8.

  • Marvel (Score:1)

    by Grax ( 529699 )
    The Marvel Universe has a lot more fighting than this universe.

    Personally the folks I know that spend too much time in the Marvel Universe don't know enough about the real universe to be able to compare.
  • Captain America is this totally arrogan, pompus windbag Nationalist. He runs around proclaiming the total good of America and condems every other society he comes across. The can't even get along with Captain Britain for God's Sake! He gets bounced around from book to book simply because he shows up, gets involved, pisses off the other heroes who then quietly ask him to leave before they have to Biach Slap him into unconciousness!
  • The team studied the statistical properties of each character, the books they were in, and who else appeared in them (through resources like the MCP). While there were some similarities to real society, a close look revealed that comics actually have no similarity to reallife at all.

    hehe.. the sentances are so much truer when I finish them.

  • What I want to know is (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jdavidb ( 449077 ) on Friday February 22, 2002 @03:32PM (#3053530) Homepage Journal

    Did they include issue #3 of Transformers [tfarchive.com]?

  • ... that the marvel universe parallels real life?

    Did they mention the similarities in genetic mutatations?? They have Captain Doom, we have Microsoft.

  • "It seems," say the researchers, "that Marvel writers did not assign characters to books in the same way as natural interactions would have done it."

    Wow. No kidding. What a freakin' revelation.

    Do you think it might instead have something to do with sales, or perhaps who had a good idea for a storyline?

    IT'S COMICS, PEOPLE! It's not real life. Any attempt to do serious analysis just ruins it for the rest of us. Well, me anyway.

    Don't these guys have some social paradigms to overturn? Or maybe some cosmic mystery to unwrangle?!

  • Slashdot presents.. Future news (Score:5, Funny)

    by British ( 51765 ) <british1500@gmail.com> on Friday February 22, 2002 @03:35PM (#3053560) Homepage Journal
    Future news:

    Scientists at the University of the Balearic lose funding altogether

  • Hah! (Score:1)

    by xihr ( 556141 )
    Yeah, that's certainly an area of legitimate scientific research, isn't it?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • This is almost as good a social commentary as a study on The Simpsons. I believe the book is called "The DO'H of Homer". EXCELLENT reading. What's even more amazing is that there is all of this philosophical depth and yet none of it was planned. There are some excerpts that you can read on Amazon.com [amazon.com] so you should check it out.
    • My wife works with one of the 'doctors' who wrote a section of that book. He is a middle school english teacher .. and has nothing to do with human-interaction research.

      [incidently .. he works in one of the worse schools in the district, even though he has a doctorate, where he was rather 'suddenly' transfered from his rather cushy county school job .. mid year .. that ought to set off some warning bells.]

      my point being .. just beacuse someone has their name in print, doesn't mean they are doing more than BS'ing.

      [still though .. there were parts in that book that were general enough to make me say .. 'yeah.. yeah ..i can see that']
    • Valid points. Of course, just because the author's past and qualifications are a bit questionable, it doesn't mean the book has to suffer. I read it in college in a semester when I was taking both "Television in American Culture" (best course I've ever taken) as well as "Philosophy of Human Interaction" so it was really interesting to see a lot of the philosophies I was studying applied to another area I was studying.
  • Scientists at the University of the Balearic Isles have analyzed the Marvel Universe and found that it is almost like real society.

    Imagine that.. humans living in real society have created fiction that is almost like... real society! Simply amazing! Good thing those research dollars are still being put to good use now that we've got the environment all figured out. So uh.. who gets the patent?
  • I always thought Rick Jones was the most connected person in the Marvel Universe. Captain America sidekick; involved in the creation of the Hulk, and Hulk sidekick; Marvell tie-ins; ROM sidekick, and didn't he work with Dazzler a bit in her performer days?
  • "Ricardo Alberich and co-workers at the University of the Balearic Isles in Spain, are tracing the evolution of the Marvel Universe in detail. "

    This is the equivalent of trying to find a deep, moral, reality based meaning out of the crap stuck on a canvas thrown onto it randomly by one of them artistic monkeys.
  • But since superheroes fight supervillans, and since when there's a fight going on, someone would be alerted to show up and help, isn't this unfairly skewed? After all, how many books in the Marvel Universe are made about average citizens? JIM SMITH: GROCER FOR HIRE, or MAXINE CARROLL: OFFICE ASSISTANT.
  • hehe...oops, I've wet myself
  • You know, this sounds way too familiar to my own life. Get up, slay horrible creatures that live on the computer (or in the bathroom, whichever decide to attack first) then return to a life of seeming normality. *shudders* Either the comics are related to us, or we are related to the comics... and the sad thing is, it wouldn't surprise me if some of these comics are older than us /.'ers. We must have been born a sketch then blown up like balloons and forced to roam the planet and get eaten by things that crawl under the bed. Or maybe we just want to hide from our own realities so we emulate those from the comic books so that the real world ends up resembling the comic world.
  • My evil minions will be dispatched immediately.
  • BTW, for those wondering, the Spiderman bit in the headline of the NSU story: Reality Check foils Spider-Man, I think refers to a previous reporting [physicsweb.org] of this study which labeled Spider-man as most connected.

    At least, I think it does.
  • Hey, on slashdot, we have friends, foes, fans, and freaks - just like in the real world! Some people are well loved [slashdot.org], others are widely hated [slashdot.org]. Some are all alone in the world [slashdot.org] while hating everyone [slashdot.org]. And some just stay close to their sweethearts [slashdot.org].

    But as you might expect, Slashdot has improved over society. Here you can always tell who loves [slashdot.org] or hates [slashdot.org] you, and you are reminded whom you love [slashdot.org] or hate [slashdot.org]. You can even ignore your enemies by assigning them a negative comment bonus. Just think of how convenient the world would be with those signals visible!

  • Marketing--If a comic company funded the reasearch, it would be usefull to them

    determin how close an artificial universe, created without much plan(if any), will be similiar to real society. May give insight to the way we think.

    This is data, a rel thinker would find a way to put it to use, instead of just knee-jerk poopooing it.
  • Hold onto your hats, true believers! By strange coincidence, I read the latest (I think it's still the latest...) issue of Captain America. Captain America was (apparently) killed by a group of Doomsday Terrorists. They didn't find his body, but from what I hear the Captain's popularity has been flagging a bit for awhile, and this might really be the end of him.
  • I know I have to elbow my way through beautiful women with enormous, gravity-defying breasts clad only in miniscule, skin-tight leather outfits every day. But, maybe that sort of thing is confined to Indianapolis.
  • This is a rather schizophrenic story. I don't quite follow the logic.

    What do the researchers mean by 'real world corollary?'

    Do they mean when you meet people out of costume?

    Ooop. Hark! The distress signal and the 'big guy' are calling! We must swoop to the aid of the under-represented capitalist war monger establishmentarians. . !


    -Fantastic Lad awaay

  • Wasn't there an issue of the Incredible Hulk where a group of evil scientists released a swarm of radioactive mutant insects on the unsuspecting humans?

    Wow, they're right! The similarities are uncanny.
  • Uhoh...

    Well, with all this thought about the whole six degrees thing. [columbia.edu]

    I'm just afraid that someone in the US's SSSSq Agency (Super Secret Secret Squirrels of course) will realize they have a good chance of finding that some hidden terrorist types (cat /bin/laden) by randomly snatching a person, and six specific contacts (since it might be likely that Joe Blow knows a guy, who knows a guy, who knows a guy, who knows a guy, who knows a guy, who knows a guy who knows where they are.

    Why... The implications of this amazing research to national defense are amazing.

    It's a good thing that affirming our consequents [datanation.com] is a common practice now-days (psst... If (all persons in the world are "connected" via a small number of links) then (randomly picking a person and starting from there is a good way to "connect" to someone specific). (randomly picking a person and starting from there is--sometimes--a good way to "connect" to someone specific). Therefore (all persons in the world are "connected" via a small number of links).

    Mmmmm fuzzy logic.

  • The scientists forgot that Spiderman is very good friends with Kevin Bacon [ixplosive.com] .

    This brings the Marvel Universe's clustering factor to ~300x that of reality, making the Marvel Universe into surreality...

    The next episode of Marvel Universe is slated to have John Malkovich play every character [beingjohnmalkovich.com]

    -D

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