I could go even further and say Luke plays for the Sonics so then all of the Sonics are in my third chain. Another example that happened to me was just a couple of weeks ago. I had met a couple of guys who lived in the apartment above one of my friends. Two weeks later I am hanging out with one of my friends that I know from high school. We picked up one of her friends, then we headed over to her brother's place and it ends up being the guys I had met a couple of weeks ago. We all laughed at the coincidence, and one of us said "Isn't it a small world?" These are common scenarios that happen to a lot of people, but these are some of them that happened in my life. My third and last example relates back to the men's basketball team at Seattle Pacific. I have become good friends with Drew Matzen, another freshman on the team. Drew and I have been going about our business on a daily basis while we have been at school. During last weeks game we both found out that our parents went to Lincoln High School together in Tacoma, Washington and our dads had played basketball together in junior high. We had not known this prior to finding out before our third game. .
This experiment of finding contacts through web mails can give you an idea of how small the world really is, but it might be even smaller than it appears. They make reference to six degrees of separation, referring that the average number of chains between people is six. What this experiment can not do is being able to limit the chains to three or four. Today people are not limiting themselves to interaction with a specific set of people. People are always expanding their horizon meeting new people and developing new relationships. There are more interracial relationships today, more opportunities for connecting globally with others through sports programs and clubs, educational exchanges, the global economy, and other organizations that didn't exist when my parents were growing up.