Interview with the World’s Foremost Beard Expert

I've never "reblogged" something before, as blogger doesn't have a button for it and I feel weird copy/pasting the entire content of a website posting from elsewhere, but I have never wanted to do so more than now. About two years ago I first heard an excellent interview with Dr. Christopher Oldstone-Moore, a historian at Wright State University. He is a pogonologist, or studier of beards (among other things, I presume). The interview is conducted by David Malki ! of Wondermark.com, an excellent website featuring repurposed Victorian illustrations used to make comic strips. Malki ! (the exclamation point is part of his name) is a very vocal beard advocate, so I was not surprised to see/hear him follow his interest into the academic realm.

I think it is safe to say that this interview is fascinating, even if you are not as thoroughly interested in beards as I am. Particularly notable is the discussion of the origins of shaving, and how it came to be the "default" look of men. Then later, the time when beards suddenly burst back on to the fashion scene. Both can be traced to remarkably specific historical events (hint: they are 2179 years apart)!

To quote Dr. Oldstone-Moore:
"The one thing I’m absolutely sure of is that these changes are connected to whatever conceptions we are developing of masculinity. Ultimately, it is always tied to the question of what is it to be a man, and 'how should I be a man?' That’s the existential version of that question, as a man. However that question gets answered is going to have a lot to do with what you do with facial hair. And that’s why I’m interested in studying facial hair, because I think it’s a way of looking at the history of how people think about their masculinity."

The interview is 24 minutes long, and both the mp3 and the entire transcipt (with visual aides!) can be found here:
http://wondermark.com/the-worlds-foremost-beard-expert/

Anyone who cares about me (or history, fashion, or masculinity) at all should listen to or/and read this interview.



The blogger's beard visits Glacier Point at Yosemite National Park

A Moment of Commentary

It is easy to think of the internet as a massive sea of trivialities, memes and pop-culture references. There is a lot of creativity out there but, maybe because of the sheer volume of media one consumes in 10 minutes of internetting, it is easy to think that the actual work took as little time and effort to create as it did to enjoy. Of course it doesn't. A lot of time and effort can go into silly video or a good joke. Even lolcats, perhaps the most ubiquitous and trivial of internet trivialities, require a good photo.

A few months ago my friend Whitney directed me to this neat poster/flowchart describing the logic of crediting an image online. (As it was created on a design blog, it is also appropriately cool looking.) A cartoonist/author/general creative-type person I follow recently wrote about his corner of this emerging debate, extending the conversation to creativity in merchandising authorship and pop-culture commentary. It also gets at why we feel the need to wear images on t-shirts, the motivations behind that impulse that I've not heard articulated as efficiently anywhere else. It's a short but excellent blog post by an internet creator and merchant who is walking the line between "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" and "give credit where credit is due." Or between "nobody 'owns' a funny sentence" and "simply repeating a funny sentence isn't funny."

"I’m glad that our knee-jerk reaction to seeing a ripoff is to call it out and shame it. I think we’re right to feel proud of someone coming up with a new idea, or creating a new combination of old ideas, but bored or sickened by the same old lazy references being regurgitated for profit. Don’t tolerate it! Having high standards pushes the culture forward faster."
(Read the excellent original piece here.)


By the way, apparently the original insult was removed, from at least one website.

Lewis and Clark and Google Maps

Happy Memorial Day. I hope your plans are a little easier to figure out than mine.

We're trying to meet some friends at Squaw Island, a possibly-offensively-named but apparently cool park in the city of Buffalo. Not having been there, I consulted Google Maps, the best online map/directions provider by far. But Google appears to be setting me up for a more interesting journey than I anticipated:


I wasn't really sure what to do with that, so I tried to readjust the view so that I could see what was going on better. First it launched me over the edge of the off-ramp. It didn't show a pile of ruined cars at the bottom, so I'm pretty sure that was a mistake on Google's part. I'm hoping it was a mistake. (I mean, I'm REALLY hoping that's a mistake.) But once I got the all-seeing eye of Google adjusted to staying on the ramp, you can see above that it wasn't any better. It appears that I'm supposed to swerve around a few lanes of traffic then launch myself straight into the air. My rocketcar is in the shop, so I'm understandably worried.

I tried to readjust again, just to get a better view of the exit sign/launch coordinates, and this is what it came up with:



After flying straight up into the air, I need to come crashing down about 5 feet later and continue on the highway. Then about 50 feet after that I need to turn my car 90 degrees vertically and take off again. (Understandably, these lines could not be seen in the previous picture because they were covered up by the first skyward rocketline.) I tried to angle the view upward to see where the lines go, particularly that last line where it just disappears. Unfortunately the lines appear infinite within the constraints of Google Maps' vertical axis. And they appear to be perfectly straight despite their contiguousness. In order to appear that way that they must either 1. have a sharp turn but go really high up; or 2. have (an)other turn(s) that aren't accounted for here. I'm imagining a Super Mario-style cloud level full of moving platforms and koopa paratroopas.

Then, one step later in the directions (with no mention of the harrowing cloudworld adventure), the line bursts up out of the ground outside a "water jet cutting showroom," proceeds straight up into the stratosphere again, then comes crashing down not a foot later. It then hops the curb into the center of an intersection:



I'm not sure if these maneuvers would be possible even in a Harrier Jet, but my Chevy Cobalt is certainly going to have some trouble. Maybe there's a spring-loaded panel under the road that pops up as I drive over it? Or a scary magnet that comes down to pick up my car? However it goes, Google is not adequately preparing me. I'll let you know if I make it.

Come on

Google ads, what are you trying to say?


I would like to know the algorithm that decided that this was the ad for me. I feel like this kind of advertising is not as dignified as Don Draper makes it look.

Nice work

I have to admit, while sifting through junk mail this really did catch my eye:



To whomever is in charge of Case's fundraising: Well done. I haven't stopped carrying the torch of Futurism and I appreciate you appealing to that sentiment. I'm still not in a place where I can be giving money to anyone else, but someday I hope to be. Keep this up.

Decade-old decade-old trivia

My parents recently decided that they are, for some reason, uninterested in keeping the boxes of magazines and scrap paper that I left in their house when I moved out a decade ago. I suppose someone else will have to become my archivist. I assume that I should have archivist, because whenever historians are trying to understand people they look back at their personal correspondence. If I become famous, perhaps the world will be enlightened by the marginalia and doodles in my "global studies" notebook. Until then, my parents quit themselves of the boxes. Feeling that it is inappropriate to be my own historian (that would be conceited), I am throwing much of it away. But one piece of paper caught my eye.

Some background: When I was in high school I was in the Student Congress, and one year during Homecoming Week I organized a school-wide trivia contest. The questions were read during the morning announcements (by me). Each homeroom got an answer sheet, which was collected, scored, and returned to them each day (by me). The homeroom with the best score at the end of the week won some sort of prize. Or maybe it was the class with the highest total points from all the classrooms. I don't remember the logistics, but I do remember that people got really into it and I was really proud that this whole idea came together. But the best part was the topic. What kind of trivia would I ask during homecoming week? Surely it was sports trivia, you say, and I say No, I don't care about that. Maybe something about the school. Or recent movies, or history, or fun facts. No, no, no, no. Or what about super nerdy stuff that only a sliver of the high school population would know anything about? And I say, BINGO.

So I now present to you, for the first time in its entirety, "Homecoming Homeroom Trivia: Old School Cartoons." The following is copied directly from my decade-old handwritten notes when I came up with the questions. Mind you, these were in the days before Google. (Remember WebCrawler?) There was just enough internet in the world for me to find the GIF's you see below (which decorated the answer sheet), but not enough for people to cheat while sitting in homeroom. So same goes for you, gentle readers, no Wikipedia allowed. See how you do...

Day 1: Thundercats
1. What was Lionel's sword's name?
2. What was the red insignia on the sword called (pictured on the right)?


Day 2: Masters of the Universe
1. Who was He-Man's twin sister and accomplice as a Master of the Universe?
2. What was He-Man's tiger named?
3. [BONUS QUESTION] He-Man's arch nemesis was Skeletor. What was Skeletor's lair called?


Day 3: Ninja Turtles
1. Name all 4 turtles and the colors of their bandanas.
2. What substance created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?



Day 4: Gummi Bears
1. What did the Gummi Bears live in?
2. What magic potion was the source of the Gummi Bear' powers?
3. What monsters were the Gummi Bears always outsmarting?


Day 5: Transformers
1. The brave and fearless Autobots were in a constant battle with what group of evil transformers?
2. What was the name of the leader of the Autobots (pictured here)?






DELETED SCENES The following was originally scheduled for Day 3, but it was deemed too difficult by the other people who were helping me...
Day 3 (original): Voltron
1. How many lions were in the Voltron Force?
2. Name one of the Voltron Force's three arch nemeses.



This was also in the days before the 80's were nostalgic and cool, before Transformers became a (live action) movie, before the TMNT got reworked as "edgy" anime-influenced nonsense, and before Cartoon Network began rebroadcasting almost all of these shows. So if you've seen the shows since their original before/after-school or Saturday morning timeslots, that's cheating too. But I'm glad that these shows are coming back. If anything, I wish they'd bring back DinoRidersand Silverhawks. But my age group is only beginning to flex our nostalgia muscles, and everything gets brought back eventually, so here's hoping. Until then, here are the answers...

Thundercats
1. The Sword of Omens
2. Eye of Thundera ("Eye of Thundera, give me sight beyond sight!")

Masters of the Universe
1. She-ra
2. Battle-Cat ("Cringer" was also acceptable, though that was his name before Prince Adam turned into He-Man. Nobody put that though, because nobody cared about stupid Prince Adam or his scaredy-tiger.)
3. Snake Mountain (if you said Castle Greyskull you are WRONG. That was He-man's castle, and Skeletor's perennial goal.)

Ninja Turtles
1. Leonardo (blue), Donatello (purple), Raphael (red), Michelangelo (orange).
• (As a colorblind kid, I was always annoyed that the blue and purple looked very similar to me. Especially because Donatello was my favorite and Leonardo was my least favorite.)
• BONUS QUESTION: What were each of their weapons? (L=katana blades, D=bo staff, R=sais, M=nunchaku)
2. Retromutagen ooze (half credit for "ooze")

Gummi Bears
1. Inside a tree (not just "in the forest")
2. Gummiberry juice
3. Ogres

Transformers
1. Decepticons
2. Optimus Prime (This was the only picture that I couldn't match to the one I used back in the day. At the time I used one that was almost identical to this, including the logo, but didn't have his big ol' gun. Columbine still was very fresh at the time and public schools were jumpy about anything related to guns. I guess that as it's gotten farther away people don't mind their cartoon characters having guns. That or school violence has become so ubiquitous that people aren't trying to blame cartoons anymore. But that's a different blog post.)

DELETED SCENES
1. Five lions (I would say that Power Rangers was a terrible rip-off, but it was made by the same people so it was more of a re-make. The main hero(s) looked almost the same, except that it was live action, set in a high school not a cool space base, and used robot dinosaurs instead of robot lions.)
2. Zarkon, Prince Lotor, Haggar the witch.

How did you do? And what do the results of this quiz tell us? Specific answers not withstanding, if this took you on a trip down memory lane, you may be a nerd. Talk to your doctor. Or treat by looking up clips on YouTube all night.

As a final note, let's face it, the Voltron theme was downright inspiring. That horn fanfare almost brings a tear to my eye!

um pandora...

I think there's been a little mixup over at Pandora ...



I guess it's easy to confuse George Frideric Handel with... is that George Michael?

How is Science?

“The writing process” by Jack Mack

- write 1-2 sentences
- re-read sentences
- erase most of first sentence and re-write
- think “I should find a citation for this”
- look up a citation by attempting to search through all the published literature in the discipline looking for the single most relevant example
- find an interesting article and begin to read it
- get inspired by some idea that is completely tangential to the original topic. write it down, don’t want to forget!
- get up to get a drink of water, think about new idea
- look in fridge
- “ugh, how long has this been in there?”
- put that back in there
- remember something I need to fix/buy/etc.
- write that down on a piece of paper somewhere
- think, I need to get back to work
- return to computer
- re-read sentences
- think “those are some pretty decent sentences.”
- oops, the verb tenses don’t match the rest of the paper
- change verb tenses
- think, “what was I going to write next? I had an idea.”
- check original outline
- see a topic on my original outline that I haven’t covered yet. “that’s ripe for some writing, maybe I can put that in here.”
- no, I can’t. it doesn’t make sense here
- start a new paragraph and write it down anyway. “I’ll use that later.”
- notice how much I have left to do
- “okay, let’s get down to business”
- get up to go to the bathroom
- pee, thinking “man I drink a lot of water when I write”
- realize that all the water is gone, so refill the cup
- notice dog
- scratch dog
- ask dog how his day is going
- tell dog I love him
- receive blank look from dog
- think of the perfect next sentence
- thank the dog
- return to computer
- forget perfect next sentence
- re-read sentences
- look at list of tangential ideas from “inspirations”
- none of that matters with what I’m writing
- look at outline, books, and journal articles until I see something related to what I’m writing
- in reading it, realize that some famous author has already written exactly what I’m writing, but better
- re-think entire topic/paper/career
- “whatever, I’ll just cite this and say that mine is adding something to it”
- find a relevant quote and use it as the next sentence
- write another sentence
- continue writing sentence
- continue, thinking “man, this is kind of a long sentence”
- remember something I previously read that I should cite in this sentence
- find reference I remembered
- cite it
- put a comma after the citation
- add the contradictory point to the other half of the sentence
- read sentence of extraordinary length, riddled with commas
- “this sentence is too long, I need to split it into two sentences”
- realize all my sentences are too long
- also they all use the same parallel construction
- also also they are all in the passive voice
- think “whatever, all stupid science writing is in the stupid passive voice and I like it anyway.”
- feel guilty because of Grammar
- page back through the paper and find a long sentence to split into two
- “now I have created two new sentences!”
- repeat

Brain atrophy vs. them learnin' books

I thought this was really interesting, especially for my highly-educated parents, who are approaching their 70's and trying not to be terrified of Alzheimer's or other dementias:
Higher education lowers dementia risk.

First of all, they provide support for the title's preposition that higher ed does help against dementia risk, which is a compelling idea on its own. Fleshing out the topic, the second half of the press release is particularly interesting. They define dementia "risk" as the inability to cope with one's changing brain, since dementia is an experience of symptoms and not a specific physical problem of the brain. The implication is that since more educated/flexible brains cope better, it takes a higher level of physical pathology to manifest the actual impairment that would display the symptoms to be called "dementia." It sounds a bit like splitting hairs/psychobabble, but it's really very profound. Basically, education adds resiliency to the brain, so it can adapt to and endure brain changes and the person still experiences a fairly normal life. It's really cool to see some real meta-analytical evidence of this theory!

It's kind of like the recent recommendation that doctors stop screening for prostate cancer after age 75 because even if a man gets it, he'll probably die from something else first. So he'll have prostate cancer, but won't experience any symptoms, so who cares? Why worry about it or go through painful treatments if it won't change anything? Again, it sounds strange to think of that as a good thing, but since I value quality of life, I see it as great. The chances that I will have the brain pathology that could cause dementia are equal to others in my age group, I have no physical advantages. But the chances that I will actually experience dementia are much lower. And that goes for pretty much everyone in my family, particularly my dad. He has both a Ph.D. and a very sincere fear of his mind diminishing before his body. I sent him this article in the hopes that it will alleviate some of that fear. Now for the next step, I'd like to see the relationship between fear of dementia and experience of dementia. (So all you neuroscientists reading this blog, you know, get on that.)

Psychology has repeatedly shown that when it comes to brains you either "use it or lose it." So get educated earlier in your life to build your brain's coping and flexibility, then keep using your coping skills throughout your life to maintain them, and you'll end up so far ahead that as your brain starts to fail you won't notice!

And that's my musing on science for the morning.

Logic Games and Web Comics

I'm currently reading Superfreakonomics, the followup to the popular Freakonomics. I really enjoyed the last chapter I read, titled, "Unbelievable stories about apathy and altruism." There's a really interesting part about Economics games/experiments (click for the excerpt, though the book goes even deeper on several of the topics mentioned here). I participated in one such experiment when I was in undergrad, so it was really interesting to hear the theoretical logic behind it. These experiments altered theory and "conventional wisdom" about people's behavior in surprisingly concrete ways. The chapter then goes on to describe real-world and laboratory experiments that changed the new conventional wisdom yet again. I didn't see the later developments in my brief exposure to econ experiments, so it was even more interesting to hear about the changes that have happened since then.

Hearing about these quandaries reminds me of how much fun logic games can be. The book (not the above excerpt) describes "The Prisoners' Dilemma" (note the apostrophe, which I believe to be more correctly placed than the more-common "prisoner's" since there are two people making choices). The Prisoners' Dilemma, and some of its cultural impact, is shown here in comic form. There's also the deceptively tricky puzzle: "There are two doors, one to heaven and one to hell. In front of them are two identical guards, except one always lies and one always tells the truth. You have one question to ask one guard before you make your choice and live with the consequences." It took me a while to remember how to answer this puzzle, and I'll fully admit that I don't think I could have figured it out if I hadn't heard the answer in some long-distant conversation. But in reading about it I came across this even trickier variant. It looks intimidating to read, but I found the email conversation a very thoughtful way of walking a non-logician through the problem. But if you really want to stretch your brain, try this variant.

Speaking of that, I found a new webcomic I like called

Following are some of my favs:

• Today's. What a good day to discover this site! It's like a cautionary tale for me on my laziest of days.


• ...and speaking of cautionary tales, this is a cautionary tale from the past about me on April 14, 2009, at 11:50pm. (Thank God for Tessa, by the way.)


• ...and speaking of the past, try this with your friends from The Future!


• ...and speaking of the future, it's nice to know I'll be appreciated!


• ...and speaking of books I read last year/movies I saw last week, I'm pretty sure this one's straight out of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.


• ...and speaking of the unspeakable!

Buttersafe has been enthusiastically added to my RSS reader. When reading through some of the archives I was literally laughing out loud, which, by the way, I abbrev as "LLOL."