Pajiba

See now, I'm all disappointed and shit because here I thought there were gonna be a bunch of pictures of people with moving ponytails, and I opened the page and sat there staring at them, and they didn't move, and now I feel stupid.

Whoever cropped that Christina Hendricks picture should be fired.

Whaa? When did my beloved Sawyer get a shitload of tatoos??? I've either been out of the loop for a long time, or supremely unobservant. Or both.

A significant proportion of the ponytails pictured include hair not of the head it is attached to. Does that have an effect on the equation?

That's a really bad picture of Alison Brie. She looks like Zach Braff.

Thirded, linny

It amazes me how quickly people dismiss that which they do not understand. Has anyone looked at the actual paper that this research came from? It contains so many equations it will make your heads spin. Take a look: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/ponytail.pdf

Protip: not all science is disease research. "Science" simply aims to understand natural phenomena. It's about increasing knowledge. Materials science, for example, aims to explore the physical properties of matter in our world. It may not interest you, but it's pretty fucking fascinating to someone else.

It's pretty apparent that people's benevolent interest in science only extends as far as appreciating science that directly benefits them; otherwise apparently we feel comfortable dismissing theoretical, exploratory research. Shall we scoff at professionals in any field that aren't curing our cancer?

Hear hear, Amanda6! (And Branded, nerdy or not, that made me laugh hard)

Applied science is as much about tools as problems and puzzles as answers. There's at least three interesting things with The Pantene Prescription:

- Lots of interesting things have skeins of independent threads flouncing around. A ponytail is just an example.

- Why can't we model this? It seems like it ought to be trivial. What makes this a hard problem?

- Why can we see so easily that that ain't right with hair bouncing around, or boobies, or water in movie miniatures splashing around. (This last is where the Reynolds number comes in, and - duh - I coulda gone for a RyRy joke. /fail)

So, The Nerds of Pantene may have made us a tool for understanding skeins of threads in general. They may have helped us understand why this particular kind of problem is hard. The way they solved this may tell us something about how human vision works - to notice that the hair is flouncing wrong, your brain has to be noting that it *isn't* seeing the equations these guys found. How does it do that?

The mathematician G. H. Hardy famously toasted - "Here's to pure mathematics, may it never find an application." Over time, even Hardy's work found useful application. At least he drank.

/musing

Off the top of my head we care about how skeins of threads move in making composite materials, weaving clothing, manufacturing some plastics, filtering / cleaning waste solutions, in how DNA pulls apart during cell division and maybe in navigating some particular Sargasso or not. (Give me a minute and I can come up with 20 something betters.)

You get weird commonalities between parts of very different problems. How is a dessert topping like a floor polish? It turns out they're both fatty emulsions, to start. (Some of them. We put a lot of strange stuff on desserts. Less weird than floors.)

In practice doing applied science goes kinda like this:

- Hey, it would be useful if we could put these photo-thingies on treads, like conductors & just hang them out there.

- Yeah, but we get a lump of tangle in no time.

- Well, how do we stop that from happening?

- Don't know. Nobody knows how skeins of threads work.

- Crap. OK, let's just put them on a big sheet of glass & eat the heavy, the breakage, and the one angle vs. many.

- But that'll suck.

- Well, we wouldn't have to do this if you could understand a ponytail.

- So, now this is my fault?

Now, thanks to The Pantene Nerds maybe we can go:

- Well, how do we stop the tangle of doom in our wires?

- Oh, there's some big math that predicts how skeins of threads move based on their Tangle Number. If we can tweak that, we maybe have a handle on this problem.

- You got the math for this?

- You are so gonna owe me, dude.

You're not guaranteed a solution, and it ain't easy, but now there's another tool in the toolkit.

I don't mean to scare anybody, but a whole lot of applied science is *still* empirical. Yes, we have physical laws, but a lot of the time our tools blow up trying to apply them. We're left with boundary conditions we know for certain, but in the soup of stuff happening it's a mystery. Here's some examples of essentially "our tools blow up" that would be really, really useful if they didn't called the Millennium Prize Problems.

Even applying tools we have takes time. I haven't read The Pantene Paper yet. (Downloaded it, so there's a fun Saturday night.) Still, I'll predict that this development is based on no more than Newtonian physics and Calculus, common tools understood by working scientists and engineers for the last 400 years. Mock that if you will but it's more accurate to say that the world is a big, subtle place that we kinda understand a bit, here and there. Grab your pocket protector and glasses mended with tape & pitch in, or shut up.

BTW, cancer comes in part from genetic transcription errors introduced when cells divide. A vulnerable part of that process is as the two copies of DNA pull apart as ... skeins of threads.

Wow Bierce. Seems like you had to go through a rather turbulent thought process to compile that last comment, though it's characteristic of the length of some of your others I've seen. It's rather dynamic, and dense. I'm glad you were able to put together something so fluid.