So today I was planning to make a passing reference during class to this whole six-degrees-of-whatever phenomenon. (Isn't it sad that these folks have only raised $200K or so, after the amount of spam they sent out on Kevin's behalf? And sixdegrees.com has evaporated into a placeholder.)
I figured I should look up the original Milgram paper. Well, Travers and Milgram, actually.
And for a moment, when the Google list first came up, I misread Travers as Trivers. Both at Harvard in the 60's, right? which made it seem extra not-implausible. Boy, would those have been some late-night discussions, huh?
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Noted on Trivers's website, in a description of preliminary results on a study of bodily symmetry:
... Jamiacan children resemble British adults: women tend to cradle their babies on the left side if their ears are more symmetrical (but not other body parts) while men show no cradlng bias.
Too weird! I've always held Miss T. on the right, which is really sort of inconvenient, since I'm right-handed. And my ears are significantly asymmetric, enough so that it matters for fitting my glasses.
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