we hold our own close right now, scarcely believing that this has happened here. this is the stuff of all parent’s nightmares.Īs a community, especially among the moms i know, there’s a sort of collective shock and fear that resonates between us. i’m unable to understand the brutal, gratuitous taking of young life and my heart aches for the loss. I echo the choir of condolence and compassion for rachael and her family. in a community this size, the tragedy is no more than 1 degree of separation away for many of us. that’s how it is in small towns, we may not know everyone personally, but we all pretty much know someone who does. the girl lived not even 5 minutes from my house, my kids all knew her and one of my closest friends tutored her. a teenage girl went missing this weekend from outside her parents home and today her discarded body was found in a ditch about 30 miles away. There’s been a lot of buzz today in the small town where i live. The following story though, i wish was fictional… but if you ask me, it’s a pretty amazing discovery originally founded in a fictional story. That may or may not be entirely accurate if you’re trying to connect yourself to some unknown rainforest tribe. in 2007, microsoft finally provided proof of its validity in analyzing 39 billion instant messenger conversations, confirming the path distance between any two people to be 6.6 degrees. Though it circulated as an urban myth for almost a quarter century, in the 60’s it gained credibility through research at MIT and harvard then later was popularized by psychology today.
it’s basically a formula for figuring out the distance of social networks. In a nutshell, 6 degrees of separation proposes that any two people in the world can be connected through the relationships of 6 other people.
chain links isn’t a story i’m very familiar with but i’m certainly familiar with the theory proposed in it, ‘6 degrees of separation’. Back in 1929, hungarian author frigyes karinthy penned his short story ‘chain links’.