6 degrees of Wilt

I often wish that facebook was more like AIM, in that when a new version of facebook comes out I can check out the new features and go back to version 4.3. I liked the old facebook. Just linked pages. No friend statuses, photo albums, news feeds or friend details (and no fucking gifts!). I liked my facebook when it looked like this:



I remember one of my favorite features that they removed was the "You
Know Karen Through..." that gave you some connection to people you didn't know. It would list one of your friends who knows one of their friends who knows them. I can imagine when that would be useful.

Girl: Hey your Brad right?
Guy: Yeah.
Girl: Your friends with Jess right?
Guy: Yeah, how do you know Jess?
Girl: I don't, but she knows my friend Tom.
Guy: Ohh, so we have no common friends.
Girl: Yeah...

Facebook finally realize that listing more that 2 degrees of separation was futile, and that listing mutual friends was probably more relevant. But I used to enjoy trying to find people on my network that were more than 3 degrees of separation away from me. I never could find any current students that I didn't know through at least 2 people.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I was driving on the Ohio Turnpike, and it got me thinking about the whole theory of 6 degrees of separation. I started thinking about who was the most pivotal node in the network. The person that most people would use to connect to other people. This person would have to have met lots of people in lots of different places and they would have to have been well known enough so that people would remember their encounter. The answer came to me immediately. Wilt Chamberlain had more connections than anyone else, ever.

Think about this, the average person only ever meets a few thousand people in their lifetimes. Even people who are very social in college rarely leave with more than 1000 facebook friends. And even then they probably don't even know all of them. But Wilt Chamberlain had to have meet at least an order of magnitude more than the average person. He had sex with 20,000 women alone. Imagine what that means, at the time of his death there were about 250 million people in the US. 125 million women. And he had sex with 20,000 of them. That mean that 1 in 6250 women in the US had sex with The Big Dipper. That's just people he railed. He probably met people he didn't rail. If you do the math, probably 1 in a few thousand people met him, which is about how many people the average American knows. I mean you could guess that most Americans were within 2 degrees of separation of him at his time of his death. Can anyone think of anyone who could equal this guy in terms of sheer popularity. So lets see, Wilt Chamberlain was in Conan the Barbarian with Arnold Schwarzenegger who was in Twins with Danny DeVito who was in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Jack Nicholson with who was in A Few Good Men with Kevin Bacon! So there.

Brian Russell's Safari Apartment

I woke up this morning at 5:30am on 2 hours of sleep to go to work on a Sunday. As I was lying in bed wondering why I signed up to work, I could hear the varmint that lives in the ceiling above my bed scratch away at the drywall above me. That's ok, its not like he is going to fall from the ceiling onto my bed. I got up and walked through the living room and stepped on like 30 ants. There fine, they clean my carpet so I can't complain about them. As I turned on the light to the bathroom hallway I saw a few cockroaches scurry away. Cockroaches aren't cool, they give me the heebe jeebes. After I get my bathroom on, I go back to my room to put on some clothes, and on the door to my closet is a frog. A frog. It started hopping around my room, getting slime all over my stuff. Why an amphibious creature lives in my bedroom is a interesting query. But my biggest concern is that I know he is in my room, but I don't know where. I am afraid to go to bed, put on shoes, or open my closet doors because he could be anywhere. What if I wake up and its on my face? What if he is in my base killin' my doods. For all I know he is watching me right now, planning his next strike. Ahhhhh.

Hey Everyone Check out the Half Albino kid!

You've heard of a farmers tan right? Yes, well have you ever heard of a bus drivers tan? No, because your not a bus driver. When you drive in a vehicle all day the sun tends to only fall on your left forearm. So my left arm is about 3 shades darker than the rest of my body. I look like I ran out of sunscreen halfway through the job. I need to put a sunroof on the bus. Or start applying sunscreen to only the left side of my body to even it out.

Cedric the Shady Entertainer

My summer apartment is on the corner the State and Arbor. It is equidistant from Bluefront and Campus Corner. We have the basement apartment of this big house and our door opens onto a large brick patio. So on Wednesday we had some friends over to grill out, play cornhole and drink some brews. When all of the sudden this large black guy comes over and asks us if he could sit on the porch and drink the 40's he just bought from Bluefront. 4 hours later were still chillin' with "ced" inside our apartment shooting the shit. He tells us about selling dope on Detroit's east side until the age of 27 and then deciding to go to Culinary Arts school at Washtenaw. We tell him about life in the 'burbs. Eventually we call it a night, and Cedric goes home. We all wonder if we will ever see Cedric again.

The next day were going to a party at our friends house and about 40 minutes after we get there Cedric shows up with some of his friends. The females that rent this house seem uneasy, but we just go up to Cedric and welcome him. And then another kid at the party sees him and goes "Oh shit, Cedric's here" and comes over to greet him. It looks like Ann Arbor has a new celebrity and he is a 29 year old culinary arts major at Washtenaw.

University of Iowa > University of Indiana

I just got back from a quick road trip I took with some friends to go out to Iowa. We were going out to Iowa to celebrate our friend Val's 21st birthday. We knew Val because she was Mark's old girlfriend and we stayed at her apartment on our way home from LA on spring break. Right before we left we decided to go a day early and spend a night at this girls apartment in Indiana. This girl went to high school with Peter and she told us they were going to have a party for us there.

Do to general apathy, I didn't bother to take the day we were leaving off work so I had to work until 6pm. We left Ann Arbor at like 6:30 and after a few illegal U-Turns we got to IU around midnight. I guess a party at IU is 5 people sitting around watching Homeward Bound and drinking. This girl ended up living like 2 miles from campus and in an apartment with no college students. Other than drink all of their Blue Moon there wasn't much else to do. So after only a few hours in Bloomington we decided to saddle up and hit the road. By request Peter decided to stay at his friends apartment with no way to get back to Ann Arbor. We hung out and got travel tips from some Mexicans that were hanging out and drinking in the Gazebo in the courtyard. Then we were off to the great state of Iowa. After a hearty breakfast at the Perkins in Peoria we continued west to Iowa City.

We got there at like 10am, and after watching Aladdin everyone was ready for a napski. But I had some stuff to do so I went to go see campus and meet some of the heartlands finest. I can say the the University of Iowa has an amazing campus. It has the old State Capitol before it was moved to Des Monies, a river and a top notch bus system. But the coolest thing about Iowa City was the campus's downtown district. It was far superior to Ann Arbor's. Instead of just a few streets of stores and bars (north State Street, Main and South U) They had a really cool three block downtown area with shops restaurants and bars. Because 19 year-olds can enter bars, there really isn't much of a house party scene. Everyone just goes out to the bars, and the bars are all within a few block of each other. Part of the downtown is blocked off to a pedestrian mall, that ends up like Greenwood during a block party but instead of houses there are bars, and instead of cops there are food vendors. The bars there are ginormus. One of the bars we ended up going to had at least 600 people in it. It was crazy considering it was a Thursday night during finals week. Iowa just had such a nice feel to it, and it seemed like a very fun campus, that I would love to visit again but I can imagine that the bars are a bit more expensive than the red solo cup in the 500 count bag.

I really like road trips because I can see the country and now enjoy the "TRUCKS" flag Ross bought at the worlds largest truck stop and the 28$ worth of illegal fireworks I now possess.

The coolest LAN party in town

In the past couple of weeks my apartment has become obsessed with Age Of Empires 3. Even though it came out over a year ago, we just got really into it all of the sudden. So last Monday about 10am my roommate Peter comes to wake me up to play a game or 4 before I have to go to work. Even though we stayed up till 6am the night before playing, we started out first game of the day. But at 11 am everything went dark. We sublet a basement apartment and when the power goes off you know it.

Well just because the people we sublet from didn't set up the power, that didn't mean that we couldn't play AOE3. So we devised a plan and immediately packed up our computers and went to the Ross Academic Center to play computer games. Sure, it seemed kinda weird saying "yeah man send me some wood then we'll attack green!" in a library but then again the only people around were football players and female athletes. They wouldn't judge us. It was like the World of Warcraft episode of South Park, but in public.

When I got home from work I was jonesin for some more, but the academic center was closed, so we took the party to the basement of the Union and rock some solid games until we were kicked out at midnight. The game is addicting and we spent a solid amount of time sitting around the apartment on a Saturday afternoon playing computer games and rejoicing the power being turned back on. So if you think you can defeat me I play a mean Dutch and a meaner French.

Dear Editor

So I called the Daily today to comment on the crossword now that the Daily has become a weekly. The phone conversation went like this.

Me: Hello
Dude: Hi
Me: Is this the editor in chief?
Dude: No he isn't available, can I help you?
Me: Yeah, I have a question, do you know what day of the week this crossword puzzle is?
Dude: No, I have no idea.
Me: Well, now that you've become a weekly publication I think you should publish the Tuesday puzzle.
Dude: Umm
Me: You see, Thursdays and Fridays are impossible and Monday is a complete joke, I like the Tuesday.
Dude: Well I'll pass that comment along.
Me: Good, because I really only use your paper for the crossword and crime notes and I at least want to enjoy the puzzle.
Dude: Ok...
Me: Well the campus community has spoken. Thanks.
*long pause*
Me: Well, bye.

So there you have it. The Tuesday puzzle for the rest of the summer. You can thank me later.