Beard stuff

I'm growing a beard. This page documents my rationale and catalogs its (my beard's) progress.

Why I'm growing a beard

Because "awesomeness" is not a well-accepted argument, I'll try harder.

Beards save time

Shaving robs me of a couple precious minutes each day. Being a white male born in 1984, my life expectancy is approximately 71 years, 55 of which I will be of shaving age. So if I didn't grow a beard, I would spend 27.88 days shaving during my lifetime, an entire February lost to the razor ritual.

The Abraham Lincoln argument

Consider the tale of Lincoln, as told by the table below.

Table 1. The Lincoln argument for beards.

	Beardless Lincoln	Bearded Lincoln
Makes eye contact?	No, too embarrassed	Gaze into my wise eyes
Occupation?	Failed lawmaker, successful lawyer	President
President?	No	Yes
Awesome?	Kinda	Yes
View of slavery?	Unfair competition, divides nation, makes South too powerful	Affront to humanity
Best president ever?	Washington, maybe Jefferson	Me
Did Jefferson Davis have a beard during the Civil War?	Who's that?	No
Did the C.S.A. win the Civil War?	WTF?	No, outside of Georgabamassippi

Pioneers of personal computing

One can argue that we are entering an age akin to the late 70's and early 80's, with new computing platforms fundamentally changing the way we use computers. We might reasonably look back on that first age for guidance. Let's meet a few of those pioneers.

Steve Wozniak (the guy doing stuff)

Steve Jobs (the guy watching Woz do stuff)

Paul Allen (the guy on the right)

Bill Gates (the guy on the left)

Richard Stallman

(A controversial inclusion, but his work during the early 80's continues to influence personal computing).

Notice the preponderance of beards in this group, 80% to be precise. Mr. Gates is the anomaly, but his smooth, boyish face suggests that he couldn't grow a beard at the time, although more research is needed. Regardless, this is strong evidence that having a beard precisely predicts one's ability to fundamentally change personal computing (for males only, of course; different criteria apply to females).

To be fair, some might claim that this evidence is biased. Let's consider glasses as an alternate hypothesis: No, only 40% of the computing greats above are wearing glasses. Q, E, and D.

The carnival argument

Are ladies sideshow attractions? Sometimes.

Are bearded ladies sideshow attractions? Always.

Grizzly Adams

did have a beard.

Why I might not grow a beard

My girlfriend doesn't like it, but she's now in Chicago. Hazard avoided.

Progress of the beard

With my logical ducks in a row, I can get to charting my beard's progress.

Table 2. Raw beard data

Day	Image	Hair length* (mm)	Status
0	--	0	--
3		2.1	Itchy, hobo-like
7		4.3	Less itchy, pimply
18		8.7	Comb-able

^* The average of three samples: left and right cheeks, and chin