The Law of Conservation of Hair

Every now and then my thoughts drift back to my distant past. Maybe this is a symptom of an aging mind running out of synapses or something; but for whatever reason it happens with increasing frequency with the passage of time. These moments are usually fleeting but sometimes these recollections lead somewhere as happened very recently when I began thinking about childhood haircuts.

My Mom used to take my brother and I to LaSalle’s Barber Shop on Elizabeth Avenue near the corner of New Point Road. Just to the left as you entered the shop was a barber chair in the shape of a small car for their youngest customers. Slightly older kids got to sit in a regular barber chair but with a seat that was supported by the arms of the chair so that the barber could cut your hair without having to bend over. Kids who fulfilled their obligation of sitting still while the barber completed his work were rewarded with a Tootsie Roll Pop®. If this doesn’t sound like a major motivator you must consider that today’s Tootsie Roll Pop® is little more than a scale model of the original. Candy back then was bigger, cheaper, and better tasting. So what else is new?

I am not planning on discussing how things were better or worse back then. I am going to talk about hair. As a kid I had plenty of it especially when you consider that I lived in a world of crew cuts that didn’t yet know of the existance of the four guys who would eventually call themselves the Beatles and change hair styles for an entire generation. During most of my life the hair would grow like gangbusters and become a part of the heaps of swept up hair on the barbershop floor. It is a never changing fact of life just like the way prices always increase by about the amount of your last raise.

When I was in my twenties my then girlfriend asked me to grow a beard. Facial hair turned her on and I suspect it tickled in just the right way at exactly the right times. She eventually left my life but the beard remains. (Useful Hint: You can hide a lot of flaws under a layer of whiskers.)

Over time the beard grew in heavier and more manly. That’s when I noticed that my hair was beginning to thin slightly in the spot where it usually does on most men. It’s a never ending process; and to tell you the truth I never bothered keeping track. But like all the relentless and gradual changes that follow the aging process the lack of hair eventually became much more noticeable.

Among my more noteworthy observations was that my beard had become fuller and drifted into an equilibrium condition where it only changes color. The hair on my head continues to get more sparse and I definitely see the day where I will be bald on top. What is amazing is that as the hair disappears on my head, new strands of hair miraculously appears somewhere else. I have become acutely aware of the hair growing inside my nose, on my stomach, and on my back. Even my ears are beginning to sprout hairs.

All of this leads me to consider the possibility of a new natural law. Am I observing the effects of the law of conservation of hair? Indeed it seems like the amount of hair on my body is a constant. Even though it freely moves from places I want it to places I don’t want it, the actual quantity seems to remain constant. By quantity I mean mass. The new unwanted hairs tend to be thicker and more massive so that each one is equivalent to three or four cranial hairs.

Seriously though, the changes taking place on my head are common to the male of the species which means there must be a driving force behind it all. I suspect this process is entropically driven. Even though my hair previously grew neatly in well defined areas, it now grows like weeds in an abandoned lot. The body is hell bent on redistributing its hair supply more evenly at the expense of places like the head. It is not unlike the many attempts by governments to redistribute wealth that invariably looks as if they had modeled their country’s economy after the body of an aging man.

Even the Machines Are Against Me

I have been absent for 9 months, truly a pregnant pause. So where have I been and what have I been doing? The short answer is everywhere and everything. At least that is how it feels.

During the past year I have seen four family members experience hospitalization, two experience unemployment, and one experience death. The company for which I work has been forced to make significant changes that include eliminating many jobs. Those of us remaining must work harder and smarter in order to maintain the profitability on which our survival depends. That means the professional staff must work longer hours when necessary. Indeed I have put in my share of 44-48 hour weeks during the past year.

The political climate has been an irritation too. Our nation has enjoyed few encouraging signs during the past twenty years and things continue to worsen. I lived through the Nixon years and remember how people reacted to his use of power. I now know Nixon was an amateur compared to the people in charge now. For the first time in my life politics is becoming time consuming. But let’s save that topic for another day.

I have also had to do battle with my old nemesis the computer. In one instance I think it may have been my fault and I learned a lot from the experience. For example I learned the value of my Norton Save and Restore program that allowed me to restore the entire system after I crashed it. I was lucky and did not lose any data. And so for the past several months in addition to being otherwise occupied I was also dealing with a rather strained relationship with my computer.

Shortly after the new year started I began to notice that Internet Explorer was slowing down. Initially I blamed my internet provider but when I checked Windows Task Manager I observed that the page file usage was about 500MB higher than normal. The standard rebooting sequence temporarily cured the problem but over time the usage would again increase and sometimes exceed 1GB. This is kind of like watching the temperature gauge go up on your automobile.

This is the first time I have experienced problems with IE7 and I have generally been quite content with its performance. An attempt to use IE8 late last year was a disaster for pretty much the same reason and so I returned to IE7. Part of me thinks that IE8 made permanent changes in the system and that is now affecting the performance. I solved the problem by switching to Firefox which cured all of the computer resource issues but there are IE features I miss. It is much easier to manage cookies with Internet Explorer and my Firefox does not allow me to change bookmark icons or at least I haven’t figured out a way to do it.

For some reason all the computers in my life have become more problematical during the past several months. My employer leases Dell computers and the most recent generation machine is somewhat buggy. For example one of the computers is connected to both our GC-MS (gas chromatograph with a mass spectrometer detector) and the headspace analyzer with a 40 position auto sampler that allows us to run samples overnight when the instrument would otherwise be idle. The old computer worked flawlessly but the new one keeps disconnecting the auto sampler. Fortunately most of my runs have been on single samples, but at some point I will have to request the services of our IT department to correct the problem. I would have called them already but I know they are currently dealing with other more critical issues due to a switch in the Enterprise Resource Planning software the company is using along with the integration of two previously separate companies.

Naturally the problem is sometimes unrelated to the computer hardware. Recently, the installation of service pack 3 for XP caused the communication between the PC and a digital camera on our microscope to cease. Apparently the drivers for Firewire were changed in the service pack. Imagine being the company receiving phone calls from hundreds of customers who want to know why their digital cameras suddenly stopped working. The company supplied an executable file to make the necessary changes and all is well again.

Just a few weeks ago I clicked on my Mathcad icon to start the program and saw the little hourglass appear for about two seconds and then nothing. The program simply would not open no matter what. The only change anyone had made on my computer was loading Chemdraw. I do not know of any issues with having Chemdraw and Mathcad both on the same computer but I can not think of anything else. I called IT and we re-installed Mathcad. It didn’t work. Finally I asked if it would be easier to take the computer and just start from scratch since all my files were backed up. This is pretty extreme but it worked.

I won’t bore you with the story about the security dongle that stopped working and ultimately cost me and my employer about 20 hours worth of productivity. Neither will I tell you right now about the crumby performance I am currently suffering through with my internet provider. I won’t share my negative experiences with the Microsoft Vista on my laptop because I haven’t spent enough time with it to have a problem. Either that or it isn’t as bad as everyone says. We’ll see.

I Think, Therefore I'm Here

During my life I have experienced the excitement of starting a new job, of moving hundreds of miles to a new home, and of leaving bachelorhood for the joys of marriage. All of these changes resulted in an improvement of my life. More importantly these changes were under my control, demonstrating clearly to me that a combination of hard work and intelligent decisions will yield good results.

I consider myself quite fortunate. I enjoy my profession and am still happily married after over a quarter century. I sit here typing this in a comfortable home reassured by the knowledge that I have enough in my savings to survive the kind of economic upheavals I am most likely to confront. Would I change anything? Mostly not, but why waste time speculating on what might have been different. Life is not over yet and I still have time to both learn and to achieve something meaningful. So why am I writing all this in a blog that no one reads?

I haven’t bothered to check the statistics on how many blogs currently exist but I am sure the number exceeds the number of volumes to be found in most libraries. Given that, what is the probability that someone will stumble upon my little piece of cyberspace? I am sure the odds are against it. Observation reveals that most bloggers form little cyber-communities and read one another’s blogs. Joining a cyber-community is simply surrendering to the premise that people will read your blog if you read theirs. The odds are against me finding a cyber-community that shares my interests and values; but I might get lucky. Still, there is the hope that someone will enter the right combination of words in their search engine and stumble upon my blog.

I confess I have no idea why I continue to write here. As I have previously alluded to maybe I think I am good at writing and need an outlet for my creativity. I suppose I just want to put my two cents in even if my opinion represents only one part per billion in the vast ocean of pointless opinions polluting the internet. I fear that most of us on the internet never rise above the noise.

If you are reading this, thank you. If you can find anything positive amongst my ramblings feel free to leave a comment even if it is nothing more than a note indicating that you visited. Don’t be shy about disagreeing with me. As President Johnson once said, “If everyone in a room is in agreement, one person must be doing all the thinking.” That may not be the exact quote but it certainly reflects the spirit of what he said. If you only hang around people with whom you agree you will develop a very narrow view of the world around you.

Whether anyone reads this or not is irrelevant. I do this for me. When I write something I question it. Sometimes I spend hours thinking about what I have written only to find out that I changed my mind. Thinking can do that. Thinking can also keep you out of trouble. I think I will have more to say about this the next time.

The Global Warming Kerfuffle ~ Part 2

In the world of science one always does a thorough literature search before investing time in a project. As the saying goes, we don’t want to re-invent the wheel. That said, I have discovered an excellent review of Global Warming by a fellow named James A. Peden whose resumé can be viewed at the end of the review. Honestly, Mr. Peden has done a much better job than I would have done and I think his work reflects a thorough understanding of the topic.

I urge you to read this review completely and attempt to understand the basic principles since there are many politicians and businessmen who are depending on you remaining ignorant.

The Global Warming Kerfuffle ~ Part 1

I have been following the global warming debate for a long time even if until recently it has been rather one sided. In the 1990s I believed that the potential for global warming as a result of the greenhouse effect was a real concern. The science seemed to make sense and it was evident that eventually it would become a problem. I must confess I am no longer so sure; therefore I thought it might be fun to look at global warming from all angles and see what we find.

Working through this topic is not going to be easy. The amount of information and data is not trivial. Consider for a moment the concept of measuring global temperatures. How many data points do you need and where do you take your measurements. Since you can not take measurements everywhere all the time you are forced to take a sample. Suppose you decide to take temperature measurements every hour at a thousand different stations. Would that be representative of the entire planet? Most of the earth’s surface is ocean so should most of our temperature measurements be made above the oceans? What I am leading up to is that before you can make any statements about your measurements, you have to prove that the method you use to make the measurements is valid. Then you have to prove that those measurements are representative of the entire planet within a margin of error small enough to detect significant differences over time with some degree of confidence. There is also bias to consider but I think we can let that go for another day.

The alarmists like to point to anecdotal evidence such as melting polar ice and destructive storms like Katrina to support their position. They predicted a horrific Atlantic hurricane season last year that never materialized. It would be very convenient to state that the melting ice proves global warming is occurring and equally convenient to state that the failure to correctly predict the hurricane season last year proves otherwise.

However, this is science and not politics. You can’t pick and choose the data you like or dismiss predictions that fail to happen. Science is a tough game and saying that the issue is settled because you have more people on your side is ludicrous. In the late 1800s the idea that the atoms in compounds like sodium chloride would dissociate into ions when dissolved in water was considered absurd. And yet, the 1884 thesis making this statement won its author Svante August Arrhenius a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1903.

I generally admire a person who supports their position with passion even if I disagree with them. Do I disagree with the idea of global warming? No. Do I disagree with global warming alarmists like Al Gore? Absolutely yes. When these zealots covered their ears with their hands and went, “La la la la…” to drown out those who disagreed with them I changed sides. What Al Gore and his followers is selling is not science. Some have called it socialism hidden in a cloak of environmentalism and maybe that is true. But that is not the issue here. What we need to sort out is the science part of global warming with neither the politics nor the religious fervor of the global warming activists.
If it turns out there is a problem then we think it through and try to find a solution that is both effective and affordable.

At the end of this exercise I may find myself doing a 180º turn on this issue provided the numbers shake out that way. As Richard Feynman once said, “Nature can not be fooled”.

First Amendment Rights

During a recent visit to our public library I was treated to a remarkable spectacle that illustrates how one can remain illiterate while surrounded by books. While navigating amongst the bookshelves in the library I observed three boys, perhaps 13 to 15 years old, huddled around a library supplied laptop computer in the reference section.

Curious about what could render three adolescent boys motionless for so long I walked over until I could clearly see that they were watching a video showing a woman performing oral sex on some guy. Cartoons and comics always depict boys watching pornographic images with a wide eyed stare; and I am here to tell you it is real. They were truly spellbound by the visual candy in front of them and oblivious to the rest of the world. The slack jaw on the youngest boy suggests that his more experienced and learned friends were providing him with an important part of his education. When he starts dating we certainly know what will be on his mind all evening.

When I mentioned this to the librarian while checking out my books she reacted as if I had told her that no one had dusted the windowsills recently. She said something about it being the parents’ responsibility, that there wasn’t anything they could really do, and besides, and here it comes, it is protected by the first amendment. Can you imagine James Madison, pen in hand, facing Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and asking, “Do you think we need a new amendment to protect pornography or do you think the first amendment pretty much covers it?”

You can’t help but wonder how adult men sworn to uphold the Constitution can give their seal of approval to McCain-Feingold, the type of law the first amendment was specifically designed to prevent, and still maintain a straight face as they justify their ruling that pornography, including virtual child pornography, deserves protection under the first amendment. If I sat on the Supreme Court and faced a case involving pornography I would point to the tenth amendment and throw the lawyers out of my court room.

As an aside even though I find flag burning to be far more offensive than pornography, I believe it is protected by the first amendment since it is a political statement. If someone is so passionate in their hatred of America that they feel a need to desecrate its flag they may do so without government interference. This can be a topic for another day; so let me get back to the original subject.

Within a week of this event the local newspaper carried a story about a teenage girl being inappropriately touched by a boy in the library. Now where do boys get such ideas? Parents would be wise to take note of how their children improve their minds in public libraries that give unlimited access to the internet. Most parents would probably agree that this is not the best utilization of library resources.

For those of you who think access to hard core pornography is appropriate for children just entering puberty I would ask that the libraries and education professionals make access dependent on learning something useful. Imagine a thirteen year old wanting to learn more about homosexual S&M techniques clicking their computer mouse and all of a sudden seeing a window pop up that says something like this:

The minor would then have to navigate through a series of screens that tests his general knowledge. Questions could require multiple choice or fill in the blank answers. It is alright that they can look up the answers on the computer or God forbid they might actually pick up a book to find an answer. We can even include some math problems. With a little luck the child will grow increasingly frustrated at having to run through this intellectual gauntlet and ask his parents to buy him his own computer for watching triple X videos.

Assuming other people besides me see this as a problem the next step is finding an acceptable solution where parents could exercise control without a physical presence. I think I have such a solution and may share it in a later post if I sense any interest.

Live Educated or Die

Months having gone by since my last post, I am inclined to again blame a lack of inspiration. This however would be dishonest. The truth is that I spend too much effort trying to write about neutral topics. I try to stick to positive events in my life and keep things light. Unfortunately this is not working for me. I realize now that I am not cut out to write about what I did on my summer vacation. So let me draw my inspiration from the things that interest me.

In my last blog entry I expressed my appreciation to Norman W. Edmund for starting a business intended for people like me. I have since learned that Mr. Edmund advocates teaching the scientific method in our schools and believes our educational system has failed in this duty. I have a recollection that the scientific method was discussed in school at some point but I may have learned it on my own. In any event I agree that it is extremely important to teach students the scientific method and pound it into their tiny little minds over and over again every time they take a science course.

When I taught introductory chemistry in college I always spent one lecture talking about the scientific method and tried to show how it could be applied to familiar topics. By discussing the importance of verifiable facts and the power of experimentation I hoped that they would get some sense of how science works.

I am sorry to report that the experience was seldom rewarding though I did have a few students who exceeded my expectations. In general I suspect that Mr. Edmund is corrrect in his assessment of our educational system except that I think his indictment of the system is too narrow. I dream of a world where the ignorance is limited to the scientific method. If my experiences are representative of how prepared our students are when they enter college we are in big trouble. The word clueless comes to mind.

It really bothers me that our young people can’t do simple arithmetic, can’t find India or the Pacific Ocean on a globe, and have no idea who fought on either side during World War II. Worse yet, I get the impression that many students simply don’t care. This is troubling. Not knowing something is called ignorance. Being comfortable with that ignorance is called stupidity.

During a discussion once with some of my demented colleagues someone suggested a system guaranteed to motivate all students to work to their full potential. In any given class the student with the lowest year end grade is either shot or else hauled off to some labor camp. What better reason is there for studying hard and acquiring knowledge than one’s survival? Joseph Stalin could hardly improve on such a system.

I imagine many educators straightening up in their chairs and reading that last paragraph a second time. Some will upon honest reflection find themselves quietly agreeing with the concept. Yes, there must be more immediate consequences albeit slightly less extreme. Their students if they can read are completely puzzled by the paragraph and asking, “Who is Joseph Stalin?”