I’m teaching cell biology, but the first thing I have to do is hammer them over the head with…chemistry. They typically haven’t realized yet that biology isn’t all butterflies and cat dissections, it’s also all built on math and chemistry, and we have to get the students thinking quantitative. Today I’m lecturing on small molecules — ions in solution, pH, redox reactions, chemical bonds — and lab is all dilutions and concentrations and basic algebra.
It’s not fun for me, either, but we’ll never get to the fun stuff without it. I’ve been cramming general chemistry all weekend, because I have to know it all better than the students.
Another important matter this week is that I have to get a haircut after a long summer of flowing locks. I’m trying to decide if I should bring back an old style. Here’s what I looked like in the mid-1960s.*
back row: the second wave of cousins, Tim Smith, my brother Jim, Matt Sones.
Front row: first wave cousins, Don Smith, me, Kelly Sones.
That haircut was easy to maintain, and cheap to cut — my mom would just stroke her electric hair clippers over my head, and it would be done. I don’t think I look anything like me now, just a homely, shaggy old man.
I was no prize to begin with, and it’s not fair that I got homelier over time.
I think teaching chemistry over and over aged me. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
*P.S. Only Matt and I are still alive. I should be grateful I’m still here, no matter how ugly I get.
News flash. We all looked like that in the 60’s, and we all look like you today!
To paraphrase Pogo, we have met the future and it is us!
I picked you out of the line-up before looking at the caption.
Those 4 died young then.
The average life expectancy of US males is now 76.5 years.
From the apparent ages of those kids and the date you gave for that photo, “mid-1960s”, they must have all died before reaching the average life expectancy of US males.
I’m seeing the same thing.
About half of my age group friends are dead and most of the rest are disabled from age related causes.
You have great hair. Stick with the locks! (I might be partial as an old man with a ponytail.)
I haven’t been to a barber shop since COVID. That wasn’t much of a problem at first since I was losing hair by the handfuls anyway as a side effect of chemotherapy; but that’s over now and the stuff on the sides, along with the facial hair, just grows and grows, although it doesn’t seem to get any longer that shoulder-length.
I now look like I would have looked like back in the ’60s had I been an aging hippie instead of a kid in the Air Force.
I got a cheap Wahl clipper from Wal-Mart in the mid-1980s. I used it until it died on me, then I bought a professional barber’s Wahl clipper. It was around $50. I clip the sides and back of my head and my beard with a 1/2″ clipper guard, and the hair on top with a 1″ clipper guard. I have saved that $50 many, many times over by not having to go to a barber shop, and I can get a haircut anytime that I want it.
I can’t help but think that if biology had been presented to me as math and chemistry at a young age, rather than dissection, I might have developed some interest in it. As it was, dissecting that frog in the 8th grade creeped us all out, with the exception of maybe a few budding serial killers in the class.
(I also made the mistake of putting a dead flea under the microscope when I was eight years old. MOMMY! MOMMY! MONSTER!!!” So much for my career in biology.)
I guess I just needed a better teacher. As it was, all I remember about junior high science class is the dissection and making cute posters showing all the internal body parts to decorate the science classroom. Well, that, and shorting out said classroom by sticking a pair of tweezers in the electrical outlet. But that’s another story.
Oh, and one thing I’m pretty sure of: nobody HAS to get a haircut.
Ah, biology… it’s really amazing how different 6-year-old us are different from 60-year-old us. You could say, that’s two entirely different species! Yet strangely they are not.
Apart from that, in my opinion for anyone past let’s say fifty, the main thing is: try to look reasonably neat. Hair or beard, long or short it makes no diff as long as it looks sort-of-decently groomed: the exploded-horsehair mattress look works only for the (very) young. So unfair!
This rec3nt photo verges on a Trump hairdo……
re nomdeplume@9: The Orange Turd’s (TOT’s) hair WISHED it could look that good!! PZ’s hair is real, unlike TOT’s combover, which does NOT make a full head of hair. Like everything else about him it is a LIE.
@billseymour #5:
I haven’t seen the inside of a barber’s since I was 15, in 1979. Fortunately my hair seems to be mostly self-managing.
(Yes, I shed like an Afghan hound, but there’s still no sign of a bald spot.)
Don’t cut your hair short. 10 years ago I got my hair cut real short and shaved off my beard. All of a sudden people started treating me different like I was a Republican or something! Guys wearing red MAGA hats would start talking to me in the line at the supermarket and a neighbor who had not spoken to me since he moved in invited me over to his place to do some shooting in his gun range. I quickly grew my hair and beard out and put up a NO KINGS sign and he stopped talking to me. Now younger folk who believe in science will talk to me about interesting subjects like ” We’re all, at the most basic level, made of vibrations.” I find that the quality of random conversations with strangers has improved immensely. Maybe it’s not all my hair but could be attributed to my Rage Against The Machine ( and similar”) t-shirts.
PZ,
Perhaps not just the fuzz over your head. Lotsa cuttable hair elseface.
—
Rich,
You tried taking a photo of your pate and looking at it? ;)
(That’s how I found out about mine via a friend; undeniable evidence)