So everyone has heard of the Bacon Number. It’s that fun little game where you take an actor and try to find the shortest path to Kevin Bacon.
For example, let’s take Megan Fox. Megan Fox recently starred in Transformers with Jamie McBride, and Jamie McBride starred in Beauty Shop with Kevin Bacon. So Megan Fox has a Bacon number of only 2.
Well, yesterday I came across something even more intriguing — the Erdős-Bacon Number.
This mishmash number is the sum of a person’s Bacon Number and their Erdős number. Paul Erdős is a Hungarian Mathematician who is used to determine a persons worth at writing mathematical papers. Interesting cross, eh?
More surprising is some of the people who actually have relatively low Erdős-Bacon numbers. Among them are Natalie Portman, Danica McKellar (aka Winnie Cooper), and Mayim Bialik (aka Blossom).
So I got to thinking — who is the center of the Blogosphere? Kevin Bacon is actually not the center of the Hollywood circuit. In fact, analysis by the University of Virginia shows that Rod Steiger would actually be a better center.
So why Kevin Bacon? It’s really a mix of a lot of things I think. Kevin Bacon is prolific, famous, and also slightly infamous.
With those three criteria in mind, I hereby deem Wil Wheaton to be the center of the Blogosphere. Mr. Wheaton is definitely prolific, unquestionably famous, but also undeniably infamous.
I mean this as no offense to Mr. Wheaton, of course. He’s both a scholar and a gentleman in my book.
But how do you make the ties in a virtual world without the clear bounds of mathematical papers or big-budget movies?
I think it works like this. In order to have a Wheaton number, your blog has to have been linked from a post of someone who was linked from a post of Wil Wheaton’s, etc, etc.
As far as I know, I have no Wheaton number at this point in time but if I were to catch Mr. Wheaton’s attention with this (for example), then sites such as Cryptomundo, Screen Rant, and The Technonaut would all gain a Wheaton number of 2 (assuming they didn’t already have a Wheaton number of 1).
Let the games begin! Kudos to the first person who can post here who actually has a legitimate Wheaton number.
Hi,
This is Loren Coleman of Cryptomundo. Does it additionally count that my youngest son is beginning college at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, along the edge of the Bridgewater Triangle, in a week?
By the way, I was on site, in 1975, investigating Tessie. No sightings of Wil Wheaton there.
Cheers,
Loren
I don’t know if you get a Wheaton number for that, but I hope you get cool sightings of neato cryptids from it!
As for not seeing Wil Wheaton while investigating Tessie, are you sure? He was only a tyke of 3 years old at the time!
[...] I didn’t even know about his blog until this morning, after I read my husband’s latest post. Once I found out about it, of course, I had to go read it. And lo and behold, he had a recent post [...]