Bacon Number and the size of Hollywood.

Hollywood is a very small place. I am not talking physically – although it isn’t very big in that sense, either – I am talking in terms of relationships.

Today, I went to the Oracle of Bacon, online, and typed in my name, out of curiosity, to see what connection it could find for me, with Kevin Bacon, the actor.

It said I have a Bacon Number of 2. That is I am only two degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.

The relationship was that I appeared in Vikingdom as Warick, (not yet released) with Ron Smoorenburg (as Captain of Jomsberg 2), who appeared with Kevin Bacon in Elephant White (2011). This brought home to me just how small Hollywood is, in terms of human associations.

Only by appearing in a film with Kevin Bacon directly, could I improve upon this Bacon Number. Whether that will happen is anyone’s guess. Nevertheless, it does show how small the filmic world is.

To put this Bacon Number score of 2 into perspective, I looked up Dominic Purcell’s Bacon Number (he is the star of Vikingdom, playing the hero Eirick). It is also 2. The connection is that Dominic Purcell was in Scenes of the crime (2001) with Robert Wahlberg, who went on to appear in Mystic River (2003) with Kevin Bacon.

Now, that is not to say that I am as well established as Dominic Purcell – I am not, by a great margin – but in terms of connectivity to Kevin Bacon in this limited sense, we are just as well connected as each other.

On the other hand, Tom Cruise has a Bacon Number of 1, having appeared with him in A Few Good Men (1992).

Of course, this measure of Hollywood connectivity is entirely arbitrary, since any other actor could have been chosen. There are in fact many more well connected actors than Kevin Bacon (I read recently that he was only the 444^th most connected actor in Hollywood). It is probable that the connectivity numbers would be smaller had a more well connected actor been chosen as the “target” than Kevin Bacon. Whatever the case, whomever is chosen to connect to, the result would be the same: Hollywood is a very small “place”.

Given how small it is, I feel fortunate to be a part of it, in my own way.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.) 

My new Bacon Number.

Idle curiosity prompted me to go to the Oracle of Bacon – which is a Bacon Number calculator – and check my name in its database. I was rather surprised to see that my new Bacon Number is 2 (if documentaries and TV shows are allowed).

A Bacon Number is the distance between a person, and Kevin Bacon, the Hollywood actor. Conventionally, it is calculated using feature film appearances, but there is an extended version that takes into account TV documentaries and other TV shows. Under the extended version, my Bacon Number is just 2. The reason for this is because I appeared in a TV show with Mark Dolan, the British TV presenter called The World’s Cleverest Child and Me. He, in turn, appeared in a show in 2011 entitled X-Men First Class 35 mm Special, with Kevin Bacon, himself. (That would mean that Mark Dolan’s Bacon Number would be 1).

Of course, Ainan’s Bacon Number would also be 2 – so too would my wife’s and my other two sons Fintan and Tiarnan. We all have a Bacon Number of 2, if documentaries are considered.

This situation tells us more about Hollywood and the TV and film industry than it does about us, however. It is very clear from this, that the film world is very small indeed – and highly interconnected. Because we have appeared in a few shows, that is enough to put us very close to Kevin Bacon, in terms of professional separation (shared projects).

The only way for my Bacon Number to get lower, now, would be to work with Kevin Bacon himself. That, however, I cannot imagine being likely. After all, what project would bring us together? We shall see if such a thing ever happens.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175

To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

Kevin Bacon Number - or degrees of separation in Hollywood.

The Kevin Bacon number has become a famous way to measure the linkage between actors and other performers, in Hollywood. It is based on the idea that there are "six degrees of separation" between any two people on Earth. This label actually arose in a play title by John Guare, and not, as commonly supposed, in an academic thesis.

The notion that we are closely interconnected in a social network, only separated by a few individuals, was popularized by the social experiments of Stanley Milgram. He was not, however, the original conceiver of this understanding, though he is often credited with it. Michael Gurevich and Manfred Kochen, both did pioneering work in this area, prior to Stanley Milgram.

The "six degrees of separation" refer to the idea that everyone is connected through the people they know, to anyone they don't know, through their friends' friends. Thus if someone is your friend, that is one degree of separation; if they are the friend of a friend, that is two degrees of separation; the friend of a friend of a friend, would be three degrees of separation and so on.

Around 1994, an idea, "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon" began to float around. The concept was simple: how many degrees of separation were there between Kevin Bacon and any other actor? It became a party trick for its inventors Craig Fass , Brian Turtle and Mike Ginelli who were all students at Albright College at the time. They would challenge people to throw the names of actors at them, then they would connect them to Kevin Bacon.

The Kevin Bacon number is a very simple way to measure the connectedness of an actor, in Hollywood. For instance, Tom Cruise has a Kevin Bacon number of 1. (This is because they both worked together in A Few Good Men in 1992); Rachel Weisz, who is successful, but not so successful as Tom Cruise, has a Kevin Bacon number of 2. (This is because she appeared in Confidence in 2003 with Andy Garcia, who then appeared in The Air I Breathe (2007) with Kevin Bacon). Incidentally, Laurence Olivier, the famed stage actor, who also worked in film, also has a Kevin Bacon number of 2. (This is because he appeared in Dracula (1979) with Frank Langella who went on to appear in Frost/Nixon with Kevin Bacon in 2008).

Now what really surprised me is to learn that both Ainan Celeste Cawley and myself have a Kevin Bacon number of 3. This is only in the expanded version of the Kevin Bacon number that includes documentaries and TV shows as well as films. If only films were allowed, Ainan would have a Bacon number of infinity because he has never been in a feature film. Ainan (and my) Kevin Bacon number of 3 arises because we were both in a documentary called The World's Cleverest Child and Me on Channel 4 with Mark Dolan, the presenter. Mark Dolan did a show called The 50 Greatest Comedy Films in 2006 in which Tony Curtis appeared. Tony Curtis then went on to appear in the Graham Norton Show 2007 with Kevin Bacon.

So there you are. The Kevin Bacon number just goes to show how small the worlds of tv and film are. Furthermore, even though neither myself nor my son have ever met Kevin Bacon, we are pretty close in the film world, being only three steps away. How odd.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

We are the founders of Genghis Can, a copywriting, editing and proofreading agency, that handles all kinds of work, including technical and scientific material. If you need such services, or know someone who does, please go to: http://www.genghiscan.com/ Thanks.

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication prohibited. Use Only with Permission. Thank you.)