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Creating a "Small World" Moment

Note: This is (yet another) very old page. The owner of this item has never come forward and at this point, I don't expect them to do so. A lot of people have written in over the years to tell me that the item is an iPod shuffle, which is all well and good, but it's not everything you would have had to do to claim the item as yours.

This page was created because someone gave me an iPod Shuffle that I believe was found in a library. I'd hoped to return it to its rightful owner.

The serial number of the iPod Shuffle is 5C817KULYX6 .

At this point, over a decade later, I think it's probably time to call time on this experiment. I'm not even sure where the iPod Shuffle in question actually is these days. I may well have donated or recycled it by this point.

There were two reasons for my doing this experiment:

1. First of all, I'm fascinated by the "small world" effect. The small world effect is what happens when a massive amount of geography is transcended by some other factor. An example of this would be as follows: you know someone and talk with them about a given subject. This is "person A", You know someone else and talk with them about another subject. This is "person B". When talking with Person A, they mention Person B. To your knowledge, there's no link between person A and B until that happens. That is what I know as the "small world" effect. It works in reverse as well.

Although I referred to this as a "small world" moment, I'm not sure that's really a good name for it. Nor was I ever particularly happy with the description above. Sometimes I have trouble putting what I mean into suitable words. To phrase it better, I probably should have said something like, "You know two (or more) people who to your knowledge don't have any cause to know one another. Later, you find out that they do when person A mentions person B (or person B mentions person A). This can transcend a large amount of geography or what were to your knowledge non-overlapping interests."

2. Secondly, I've mentioned the concept at least once of a so-called "real life version of Google" that would find things (anything) that you've misplaced. This page will be indexed by Google, and that includes the serial number of the item above. If the person who lost this item has the serial number and ever thinks of punching it into Google or their favorite web search engine, this page should be (almost) the only result that comes up.

All these years later, you can actually buy little tracker doodads that emit a signal that can be detected by a nearby phone or similar device. This is probably as close as we'll ever come to that "real life version of Google".

This page was created 06/26/2009. Last updated 04/11/2021.