Center of The Hollywood Universe
While at the University of Virginia, Brett Tjaden created the Oracle of Bacon, a computer program that uses information on some 800,000 people from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). The algorithm calculates "how good a center" an individual IMDb personality is, i.e. a weighted average of the degree of separation of all the people that link to that particular person. The site returns an average personality number, e.g. for Clint Eastwood, it returns an average "Clint Eastwood Number." From there the Oracle site posits "The Center of the Hollywood Universe" as being the person with the lowest average personality number. Kevin Bacon, as it turns out, is not the "Center of the Hollywood Universe" (i.e. the most linkable actor). In fact, Bacon does not even make the top 100 list of average personality numbers. While he is not the most linkable actor, this still signifies being a better center than more than 99% of the people who have ever appeared in a film. Since each actor's average personality number can change with each new film made, the center can and does shift. "Centers" have included Rod Steiger, Donald Sutherland and Dennis Hopper (the current center). Karen Black is the current and all-time highest woman in the list.
Read more about this topic: Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon
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“Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment. The system of universal education is in our age the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of enlightenment, and it is peculiarly appropriate that the schools be made by the people the center of the day’s demonstration. Let the national flag float over every schoolhouse in the country and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.”
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“Louise Bryant: I’m sorry if you don’t believe in mutual independence and free love and respect.
Eugene O’Neill: Don’t give me a lot of parlor socialism that you learned in the village. If you were mine, I wouldn’t share you with anybody or anything. It would be just you and me. You’d be at the center of it all. You know it would feel a lot more like love than being left alone with your work.”
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“Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.”
—Erica Jong (b. 1942)
“Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)