"Every single person in here is related"

[Garson O'Toole]

"Every single person on Earth is at the least 50th cousins with everybody else."
http://j.mp/L3k7sC

This nugget of pop-science was tweeted by Maria Popova ‏@brainpicker.
The link leads to a video that is part of the V Sauce video series on
YouTube. I cannot vouch for this fact or factoid, and I do not know if
there is a mathematical analysis buttressing the claim.

It is true that there exists some N such that every person on Earth is
an Nth cousin. (Unless there was some odd alien intervention with
multiple seed stocks.)

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 9:33 AM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: "Every single person in here is related"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> As is so often true, Larry is correct.
>
> JL
>
> On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 7:30 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>> Subject: Â  Â  Â "Every single person in here is related"
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> OK, here's the background: Â reporter Ali Reed on News 8, WTNH TV (the
>> local ABC affiliate in New Haven), promoing an upcoming segment, is
>> pictured in front of a classroom in what turns out to be Greenwich High.
>> Â She teases:
>>
>> "This high school classroom in Greenwich may *look* like any other class,
>> but it's not. I'll give you a clue: every single person in here is related."
>>
>> The real clue is the sub-thingy (what are those stationary crawls called
>> again, when they don't actually move?), which reads: Teeming With Twins.
>> Â Yes, it's a classroom in which each student is related to some other
>> student present--they're sets of twins or braces of triplets. (Turns out
>> there 18 sets of twins and two of triplets in the freshman class,
>> apparently some sort of record.) I couldn't describe that situation as one
>> in which "every single person (in here) is related", which for me can only
>> refer to a situation in which everyone in the room is related to everyone
>> else in the room--one big happy (or not so happy) family. Â Or maybe it
>> could mean that everyone in the class is related to someone, which is
>> *certainly* true (if uninformative). Â But what it *can't* be used to mean
>> is that everyone there is related to someone else there. Â YMMV.
>>
>> LH
>>
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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