News That Sucks. Phrasal noun. 1. News that should not be news.  2. News that is bad news, in the sense that it is poorly written, reported, or just untrue.  3. News so ridiculous it makes you shake your head in sadness and ponder why such things exist.

One thing that always gets me is useless studies.  "A recent (poorly carried out) study (attempts to) shows that doctors (what doctors?) may (or may not) have discovered (where?) a pill that can help treat (add it to the cock-tail) cancer!"

A great example of a pointless study that you may have heard about recently is the one carried out by Microsoft that "confirms" the six degrees of separation theory.  Here is the article, right from the source.  Instant messaging world confirms six degrees of separation.  There are so many things that make my head hurt on the inside about this so called "study" that I don't even know where to begin.  Oh wait, yes I do.

Let's start with the word "confirms."  The most glaringly wrong fact about this "confirmation" is that the article states the study has, "determined that, on average, any two could be linked in 6.6 steps."  What that tells me is that the idea of six degrees of separation is anything but confirmed.  If anything, it confirms it isn't true, because there is now proof that it is MORE than six degrees.  And furthermore, it is an average, thus, many people are separated by much more than six degrees.  I'd like to see the mins and maxs on that graph.

Now you might be thinking that I'm a little nit picky.  You may assume that 6.6 is pretty close to 6 degrees right?  Wrong.  And why is that a wrong assumption to make?  Because each number is exponential.  Think of it this way: Let's say you know three people.  Those three people know three more, and then three more each.  By the time you get to the sixth step, that is 729 people.  But what is the 6.6th step?  1409 people.  It doesn't take a math wizard to realize the huge difference there (nearly doubled).  And the difference only increases by each person you know, and I think it's safe to say that you know more then three people.

For the sake of argument, we'll grant that the study does confirm the theory, or at least an amended theory that says, "6.6 Degrees of Separation between all Microsoft Messenger users."  I still say the study has little merit, because again, just by looking at the numbers, it isn't that hard to realize that at some point, everyone is connected through someone.  I mean, you can only multiply a number by itself so many times before you hit the population of the world.

How about some more math eh?  (And before I get any complaints, I'm quite aware that the math for such a calculation is much more advanced than what I am performing, but I'm trying to keep it simple and also make a point.)  We'll work backwards this time.  We'll start with the population of the Earth, about 6 billion.  If we each know x people, and they each know x people, how many degrees of separation y is it until we have the entire population?  Well, root 6 (y=6) of 6 billion is 42.6 (x=42.6).  Do you know 42.6 people?  Probably, but it could get messy as certain people know each other and what not.  Root 7 of 6 billion is 24.9.  That's becoming more reasonable.  The point of the matter is, the more steps you take, the easier it is to reach the entire population of the world.  It's no great mystery that we are (and almost have to be) within six to seven degrees of separation with everyone else.

We could do math calculations all day, but there is one last thing that gets under my skin.  Microsoft performed this study, as far as I'm aware, without the permission of any of its users.  Were you aware that Microsoft was collecting and studying who you were talking to?  Because apparently they were.  Yes, the article states, "The researchers stress that they were not privy to the contents of messages and that information indicating people's identities was removed."  But doesn't that imply that someone was privy to that information?  Someone out there at Microsoft knows who you are talking to and what you are saying.  Enough so that they can remove any incriminating evidence before passing it along to researchers to study.  Isn't that just a little unnerving?

While it is cool to think that we could all be connected so closely with one another, the simple fact is that 6.6 degrees isn't as close as you'd think.  We do live in an amazing world where we can use the internet to talk to just about anyone we ever knew and meet new people as well, but until the degree of separation is more like 3.3 instead of 6.6, we're still not that close, no matter what a study implies.  It's all in the numbers.

Jaybird currently resides in Seattle where he reads comics, works in a library, and writes for this site.  He has also been known to blow your mind, rock your world, and eat pizza.