hair today gone tomorrow

(4 comments)
2004.12.15
Science of the Moment
Men tend to have squarer jaws than women, and they shave to highlight this. If so, this would explain the trend for emphasising the edge of the jawline with a fringe of hair. But moustaches are a mystery, to evolutionary biologists and to practically everyone else.
The Economist on The bare truth: "Why are humans nearly hairless? And why do some wish to become more so?".
Like the article mentions, we ARE pretty hungup on hair, especially in this country. There are so many places we don't want it, but if a guy starts losing the stuff on his head, watch out. The article mentions 3 interesting theories: my favorite (if not neccesarily the most likely) is the "aquatic ape" idea, the "parasite load" one is ok too, the "it's too hot" is just too mundane. And then there's always the chance that it's just a weird sexual selection thing.


Pastime of the Moment
(Warning, some there might be some pornographic thumbnail images linked to here, depending on your settings at Google) images.google.com provides a great way to burn time in tiny little portions, without too much risk of being sucked in for hours... I just think of random things to type in and see what images there are associated with them...of course, if you turn of "SafeSearch" it's surprising just how many keywords lead to porn.

And then you can think of metagames to play with this...like, find out which ex-girlfriends' first names have the best image selection...for me, some are hot, and then some are not.

Of course, there's always the Random Personal Picture Finder(tm) from diddly.com -- it uses the fact that many people don't bother renaming photos from whatever name/number the camera comes up with before dumping them to the web to come up with big semi-random selections of snapshots.