After reading about an interesting phenomenon witnessed in a cartoon by Randall xkcd I decided to see how true it was that you could get to Philosophy from most any Wikipedia term via a reasonable number of clicks (here the devil waits, no doubt). The principle:
If you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”.
Being a good citizen of the Internet I started my search with the article on Charlie Sheen, hopeful that I was a mere two or three hops from my beloved Ivory Tower description. The truth, it turns out, is far more amusing. Follow the clicktrain:
- Step 1: Charlie sheen -> Martin sheen -> Stage name -> Pseudonym -> Name ->
- Step 6: Noun -> Linguistics -> Human -> Taxonomically -> Science ->
- Step 11: Knowledge -> Facts -> Information -> Finite -> Mathematics ->
- Step 16: Quantity -> Property -> Modern philosophy ->
- Step 19. Philosophy
Now of course I have to write a script to facilitate exploring distances between terms in Wikipedia. After more important projects…
