Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Politically, I am a nobody. Neither am I a celebrity. But it turns out that I am at most five contacts away from Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Each of them has, according to the first hit I found on Google, a Bacon number of three. I have a Bacon number of two[1]. So connecting only through appearances in IMDB-listed films, I am no more than five relationships away from ObL.

Who knows how few personal relationships[2] link any of us to some lesser-known (but still known) terrorist?

Casting a really wide net in the search for terrorists based on associate-of-an-associate-of links[3] is going to gather so many false positives that it will be entirely useless.[4]

And of course, lest anyone think to question my patriotic bona-fides or smear what they perceive as my liberal politics[5] based on my being five contacts from Hussein and ObL, I must point out that this means the least connected and most conservative person who has ever exchanged flamage with me on a mailing list or LiveJournal is at most six contacts away from Osama bin Laden himself! And that's exactly my point: that this number tells us nothing about the people.

[0] I was looking up Osama bin Laden; finding out that I am the same distance from Saddam Hussein was a side effect. The title of this post does not mean that I'm one of the folks the Bush administration tricked into believing that Hussein was connected to al Queda. Though obviously ObL and Hussein are only five degrees apart based on this same measurement...

[1] I was an extra in Forrest Gump.

[2] As in actually having conversed with, exchanged correspondence with, or conducted commerce with -- my being an extra does not mean I have a personal relationship with Tom Hanks, and I'm assumimg that the FBI and the NSA aren't actually interested in the Bacon numbers of extras.

[3] I'm not sure just how wide a net they are casting, but I've heard of folks being listed as persons of interest by virtue of having rented a room from a terrorist's unsuspecting in-laws, so there's some suspicion-by-contagion. Still, unless it turns out[6] they really are sweeping everyone with any detectable relationship a few contacts away into the web of surveillance -- plausible given what has been said so far about the extent of the illegal wiretaps and the data mining -- consider this entry a musing about hypotheticals.

[4] Unless, of course, the use to which you really hope to put such data is the smearing of your political opponents or finding excuses to arrest gadflies, instead of foiling and capturing terrorists.

[5] I do look liberal. Measured against most yardsticks, I'm probably somewhere that side of center. But I look a lot more liberal in contrast to the current crop of neo-conartists than I do standing next to traditional (American) conservatives with whom I have a fair amount in common. I'm a little unclear over exactly where to label myself, other than knowing I'm not a perfect match for the conventional ideologies and a certainly not a 'winger' (left or right). The two different two-axis political-identification quizzes provide useful information, but I still don't feel I quite represent the spots on the graph where either of those places me. So I'll only go so far (for now) as to say, "It's probably not too misleading to call me a liberal." Then again, these days it seems the only other people willing to use the word "liberal" at all are the ones who use it as synonymous with "liberal extremist", which makes labelling a bit bizarre ...

[6] I'm a bit behind on my LJ and other reading.

[Edit @ 2009-06-11 04:40: A more intelligent search (and possibly the effects of movie/television appearences occurring in the last 41 months) reduces the easily-discoverable degrees of separation to ... three steps between myself and bin Laden, two steps between myself and George W. Bush. That's using The Oracle of Bacon with all genres checked and all media other than video games, and referencing everyone to Tom Hanks (because of the Forrest Gump connection) instead of forcing all linkages to go through Kevin Bacon.]