The bald fact

"What's your story?  When did you get to the US?"

At the end of a day of listening to presentations by budding and mature scholars, we were at dinner.  At my table, I was one of the three---at that table of six--who has made a home in America. Of course, I was only one who looked like I might have come from somewhere else--the other two are Scotland and Israel.

"Interesting you should ask me that," I said.  "I often review my life and look at the photographs.  What shocks me the most is how young I look in those photos when I was fresh off the boat."

And then I laid out my worst problem in life.  "I had lots of hair back then.  And black."

We laughed.

I am now a bald professor with a grey beard.  I have now become the cliché.  I suppose I can make a complete caricature of myself if I wore a tweed jacket with elbow-patches and smoked a pipe as well ;)

Of course, it is all because of the male pattern baldness.  It is not my fault; shit happens!

Here is W.B. Yeats beginning a poem with "bald heads" as if I need any reminder!

The Scholars
By W.B. Yeats

BALD heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;
Wear out the carpet with their shoes
Earning respect; have no strange friend;
If they have sinned nobody knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

In a few minutes, this bald head will find out what the young women and men bring to the class.  And later I will edit their lines.  Maybe a bald head is an asset that makes me seem more learned than I really am. ;)

The Age of Aquarius is ... hairless?

It has been warming up--this time, it is the "normal" warming up of the summer, in contrast to the unusual and unseasonal Chennai summer in Eugene ;)

As a neighbor once commented, "the legs come out."
Skinny legs.
Muscular legs.
Fat legs.
Short legs.
Long legs.
Dark legs.
Tanned legs.
Never-seen-the-sun legs.
It is legs, legs, legs.

But, here is the strangest thing: increasingly, it seems like legs alone do not reveal the gender!  I could show you a bunch of photographs of legs and I bet you will fail more often than not when it comes to correctly identifying whether it is a man or a woman whose legs you just saw.

Why?

It comes down to hair.

Yes, hair.

Lemme explain.

You perhaps have forgotten this post from two years ago in which I scared you with a photograph of my hairy legs and the untanned feet; I haven't! ;)

Are you back after puking?  Good! ;)

I used to think that I didn't have enough hair on my legs and arms and chest and face.  I had a couple of collegemates who could have braided their leg hair; boy was I jealous of them!

But, now when I walk and observe people on the path and by the river, there seem to be as many hairless male legs as there are female ones.  The few hairy legs, it turns out, could be of men or they could belong to women--after all, this is Eugene!

Because this is America and not Europe, women don't go topless.  But men do.  And most of the men do not seem to have any chest hair either.  What's going on?  Did I delete without reading the memo that I should shave the hair off my legs and chest?

This is the age of Aquarius that we have been waiting for?! ;)

Where do women have curly hair?

When I had a tough time recalling a student from the high school days, I posted a question about that classmate in our Facebook group.  "She had curly hair" noted another classmate.  I can't even recall who had curly hair and who had straight hair.  All I know is that they all had black hair, given that there were no blondes and redheads in that part of the world!

Later, I remembered a comedian (I think it was Mouli?) in an old Tamil movie playing on this theme of curly hair.
He asks his friend, "where do women have curly hair?"
The friend is shocked with what seemed like a question that was about the pubics.
The comedian then says, "in Africa."
Haha!

Which then got me wondering, well, why is the public pubic hair curly? Risking doing this search using my work computer, I went ahead and asked Google that.

The BBC says:

Pubic hair is quite different from hair on the head. Instead of forming a round shape, the hair is oval. It is always short and has a coarse and curly texture. The growth period for pubic hair is short. Within six months, the hair follicle dies and the hair falls out. Pubic hair never gets a chance to grow longer.

But, it does not explain why the pubes are curly.  So, off to the Scientific American.  I am stumped even with this piece of information:

After all, we appear to be the only species of primate (perhaps the only species, period) that bears this type of strange hair around our genitals.

I would have thought that the chimps would have too, especially when they have a lot more hair all over their body. Aren't we special!

[Robin] Weiss speculates that one of the main reasons that human beings uniquely evolved a “thick bush of wiry hair” around their genital regions is its visual signaling of sexual maturation. (It also likely serves as a primitive odor trap and aids in the wafting of human pheromones.) So pubic hair acts as a sort of blinking marquee, indicating for prospective sexual partners that mating with that individual could be potentially a fruitful exercise in genetic perpetuity. Weiss believes that the advertisement of our fecundity suggests that pubic hair would have arisen only after we became “naked apes,” causing it to stand out so vividly against the backdrop of an otherwise hairless body.

No kidding!  We shed our hirsute appearance, became hairless, and in the process grew pubic hair?  Evolution happens with humor, too, eh!

It’s not entirely clear why pubic hair is so distinctly thick, short and, usually, curly, but a friend of mine, the biologist Anne Clark from SUNY-Binghamton, did point out to me last week (while we were hiking on Kapiti Island in New Zealand, which made it all the more memorable) that anything else would be rather impractical. To have long, flowing, stylish locks growing down there wouldn’t be terribly convenient, especially given the logistics of sexual intercourse.

Seriously?  This is the best explanation we have on why pubic hair is curly?

Oh well. Forget it then. If even the Scientific American does not have a quick and easy explanation!

Do we at least know why the hair on the head curls?  Slate explains with a physics lesson!



How on earth did we handle such curiosities before Google and the internet?

A professor's hairy questions on life!

It has been a few months since I last met with my cousin.  No surprise, therefore, that the first words out of her mouth, after she said hi, were "your hair is fully gray now."

If she has inherited the genes from our grandmother, as I did via my mother, then it is only a matter of time before the black on her head transforms into grey.  Haha, the joke's on her ;)

The first gray hair on my head appeared even before I had experienced the agony over the first pimple!  But, the grey hair's appearance did not bother me at all.  I had grown up with quite a few gray-haired adults around me and I thought it was normal for some to have grey hair.

The process to fully grey, of course, was one that took decades.   When I started growing a beard, I was a graduate student, and the hair on top and on the face was mostly black, with occasional gray.

Now, the little bit of hair I have seems to be all grey, and so is the beard.

The beard though wants to grow uncontrollably fast compared to the hair on top, and if it were not for the beard trimmer that I use every few days, I will pretty much be a real-world example of the caricature in the following cartoon :)

As you can see, I don't look that different from the cartoon image .... muahahaha

Why does the hair turn gray anyway?

Gray hair, then, is simply hair with less melanin, and white hair has no melanin at all. Genes control this lack of deposition of melanin, too. In some families, many members' hair turns white in their 20s.

Btw, is is white hair or grey hair?  More importantly, is it grey or gray?

Gray and grey are different spellings of the same word, and both are used throughout the English-speaking world. But gray is more common in American English, while grey is more common in all the other main varieties of English. In the U.K., for instance, grey appears about twenty times for every instance of gray. In the U.S. the ratio is reversed.

So, given that we are part of the ape family, one has to wonder: do male chimps go bald?  do orangutans go grey?

Don't be a bag of lazybones and expect me to answer everything--find out for youself before you grey and more ;)

Don't ever get involved with a redhead. How about a grey one?

When I spotted a redhead on the bike path, I was reminded of a graduate school professor, Jim, who, during a trivial conversation recalling his days at Stanford, advised me, "don't ever get involved with a redhead.  They cause heartache."

I suppose Charlie Brown and redhead troubles of the heart are true, after all!

Back in India, as a kid I was always intrigued by Charlie Brown's strange fascination for the red-haired girl, especially at Valentine's Day time.

Source

Good ol' Charlie Brown often drove himself crazy over the redhead.

Another graduate student, Karl, was a redhead himself, and he often joked, semi-seriously, about how redheads were becoming very rare and that perhaps he ought to marry a redhead and have children with red hair so that the genes don't get wiped out.  I wonder if he ever did that ...

Of course, with easy coloring techniques, anybody can become a redhead, a blue-head, or whatever.

I am very happy with my gray hair--it is really gray, and rumors that I dye them gray are just that--rumors :)

A few months ago, I was at the grocery store checkout counter thinking about what I should cook, when I noticed that the young clerk was a real redhead.  Perhaps a high school senior or a college freshman kind of an age, and the redhead grabbed my focus.

I suppose she either sensed my looks fixated on her hair, or perhaps she actually saw me.  In any case, when she was done totaling up the grocery items, I looked at her and she was already smiling away.

"Wow, a real redhead!" I said.

She smiled even wider a smile and happily replied, "yes, it is all real."

The way she responded, I think I made her day with my comment.  At least, I like to think so.

So, why haven't bald men gone extinct?

Years ago, back in California, I asked a colleague--a biologist--why we don't have a greater variety of colors when it comes to hair on our bodies.  The thought was triggered by the daily sights of students, almost always women, with so many colors on their heads, thanks to the dyes humans have developed.

Her reply didn't satisfy my curiosity.  Or, perhaps, I was too stupid to understand her answer?

A few months after that thought, I was shocked at a more personal revelation--I was beginning to develop the typical male bald patches.

A course that I taught had students in the same classroom and students at another off-campus site. The class was held at a television studio-classroom, and images and sounds from the studio were sent in real time to the off campus, and the video and audio from there were beamed back as well.  The off-campus room had only one camera, while the classroom where I was had a camera turned towards the instructor (me) and another from behind me to capture the students.

There was a monitor in my view where I could see the images from the cameras.  And that is when I caught the image from the camera that was behind my back--it showed the back of my head with the (then) thinning hair where the scalp was beginning to shine through.

It was so much a shock that I remember commenting right there something along the lines of "wow, I am going bald!"

Since then, the hairline in front has receded a lot.  The back has become a lot smoother.  When raindrops fall, as they do for nine months of the year here in Oregon, there is very little hair on top to act as shock-absorbers, and I can feel every drop falling like a pebble.

Over the years, the question about hair, in terms of colors, has, therefore, and understandably so, morphed into why there is baldness at all.  Does it serve any evolutionary purpose?  If it does not, and if baldness is a disadvantage, then can we expect bald people to become extinct?

Robb Dunn comments on the question of "why haven't bald men gone extinct?" in the New Scientist.

The hair on our heads may protect us from the noonday sun, maintain body heat when it is cold, and even attract a mate. If so, men who lose their hair are at a disadvantage, and you would expect natural and sexual selection to have weeded them out. So why haven't bald men like me, or at least our versions of genes, gone extinct?

Turns out that it is a teaser essay, without any real explanations; the mystery continues :(

It seems like the rate at which I am balding is far from steady but increases every single day. 

A couple of weeks ago, I wondered how I might look like if (when?) I become fully bald.  So, in a typically scientific approach, I headed (pun intended!) to the barbershop, and came out looking like this:

A few more steps to satisfy my curiosity, and I became:

I don't know about all the bald people, but I am well on my way to extinction :)

What is common to the economy and my head? :)

Beards, bald-heads, presidents, and me

Yes, this is me. I wanted to find out how I would look without facial hair--it has been a number of years since I last did this. Not bad, eh!

One of the most admired presidents--Lincoln--had a beard. Teddy Roosevelt had a big fat mustache. But, think about this: we no more have presidents with facial hair. And, at the same time, we no longer have male presidential candidates who are bald. With female presidents, we will not have beards and baldies--well, it will be rather strange to have a bald and bearded female president. Heh heh!

The last president who had a shiny dome? "I Like Ike". Ike was also the last president to almost alays ever wear a hat while out in the public.

JFK, photographed often on beaches and on sea, eliminated hat-wearing, and also set the trend that baldies are ineligible for the Oval Office.

As Time put it, it was the simple sartorial gestures of John F. Kennedy that really shaped 20th century American style. The images are iconic now—a rolled-up sleeve, an untucked shirt, a shaggy head of hair—like something out of a J.Crew catalog or a Ralph Lauren advertisement. But in 1961, Kennedy's confident, carefree style was a radical departure from the copycat boxy gray suits and felt hats that had defined men's fashion for previous generations.
Among other things, Kennedy banished hats for men, even disposing of the top hat for his inauguration speech.

I like wearing a wide-rimmed summer hat. My favorite was a hat I had purchased when we visited the Amish countryside in Pennsylvania many years ago. I wore it a lot when we lived in the hot and dry Bakersfield. Until my daughter sat on it and crushed it one day :-(