Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists
Photo: Jonathan McDowell
You can forget the mad scientist in his white lab coat. Today’s stereotypical scientists more often look like rockstars – they wear their hair long, and in some cases, unbrushed. And they have a club, the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists.
Jonathan McDowell, from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists in May, 2007. He claims his long hair began as an accident – he was unable to pull himself away from studying black holes and dark matter long enough to get it cut.
In this podcast, we’ll be speaking about humor, geekiness, and of course, his hair.
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Lindsay I loved this piece! LFHCfS4eva.
I noticed in the astro department I used to work in an unusual number of of scientists had hair. Seriously! Across the board, very few balding astronomers. what’s up with that? (just look at einstein, i guess. he had his till the end)
It is this “brush” with science that provides nourishment for hair growth. Unfortunately, much like Rogaine, individual hairs will begin to fall off, almost immediately, when one discontinues contact with science. (Astrophysicist Weekly, “My Hair Gets In the Way of Research,” March 1998)
In the magazine “Grooming for Astrophysicist,” Mary Toodelstoof recommends highly engaged researchers to “take a step back and read nothing but romance novels, for a solid week, once every six months” to help make hair growth more manageable. Oddly enough, this long hair dilemma also seems to affect beet growers of Siberia. Where average hair growth of five inches per week (even surpassing the astrophysicist @ 3 ½” per week) has been reported, for both males and females, during crop seasons. (National Intelligence Survey, Apr-June 2005)
Other disciplines too have their own unique dilemmas. Those majoring in Chemistry will have, on the average, six inches of additional pubic hair growth than those majoring in other areas. Biologist typically grow hair on their elbows, sometime during graduate school attendance and the matter gets worse if one also writes a PhD thesis (which seems to promote heavy mustache growth, in both males and females.)
By the way, back in late ‘90’s, there was an Associated Press distributed report regarding body hair and intelligence. It seems, there was correlation between extreme body hair and high-intelligence! (God I hope this is true… sigh…)
As for Albert Einstein, it turns-out that he had a cousin (Seth Weidelberg) who was bald as a cue ball! He of course had no interest in science and was more of a “business man…”
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(Out of the above five paragraphs, only one contains true information; can you guess which?) #4