How Stuff Works

I love the technology that pushes Blogs and Podcasts to me.  I check my Google Reader every day and listen to podcasts as well.  One of my favorite sources for both is How Stuff Works.  My favorite podcasts for are Stuff You Should Know and Techstuff.  I think everyone could like SYSK but Techstuff is probably more for people like me.  One of the blogs from HSW.com is from the founder, Marshall Brain.  Below is an excerpt from one of his latest posts.


Leigh cuts my hair. She cuts all of the kids’s hair too. She has been doing this for more than 10 years. It started because one day we were at a K-mart and they had a bunch of remaindered books on a table for a quarter each. One of the books was “How to cut hair” or something like that. If you think about it, that little book has saved us thousands of dollars over the course of a decade.
So I found myself sitting in the kitchen the other night and Leigh was cutting my hair. It was late and I had a lot I was thinking about, and Leigh asked this idle question: “Why do you think we have three blond kids when neither of us has blond hair?” I sort of went into a “pop quiz” mode. Imagine that you are in a science class and the quiz question is, “A man and a woman are raising four children. Neither the man nor the woman, nor either of their parents, are blond. Yet three of their children have blond hair. What are the possible causes?” Yes, there are genetic reasons for children to have blond hair even if the parents don’t. It works the same way for eye color as seen on this page. It gets kind of complicated though, and like I said it was late, I was thinking about other things, and I did not have any particular desire to probe complicated things.
What is a simpler explanation? After all, Occam’s razor says, “the simplest explanation is usually the correct one”, and in pop quiz mode the simplest answer almost always requires less writing. It’s not a radio interview or anything like that where I would need to apply a social filter – I’m in my kitchen talking privately to my wife. So, without really thinking about it, what I said was, “maybe I’m not the father.”
That is a perfectly acceptable scientific hypothesis, and probably the simplest explanation. But I had not bothered to factor in social implications, it being late and all. And really, why should you have to factor in social implications when it comes to science questions? Science is science, and that is a logical, simple answer to the question if it had been asked in a vacuum.
This situation did not turn out to be a vacuum. Fortunately or unfortunately, many humans are social animals. There is a funny quote attributed to Oscar Wilde, something like, “A gentleman does not offend people unintentionally.” That is a huge high bar if you think about it, because you have to be able to do on-the-fly social calculus that prevents offense to all parties in all cases. (It could be argued that Winston Churchill was able to do the calculus in the opposite direction, in order to maximally offend people when necessary). People who can do the calculus consistently in either direction definitely have a gift.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I very nearly ended up walking around the next day with half a haircut. The lesson you can take away from this vignette is that science can sometimes be dangerous, and it is unwise to make alternative suggestions to your wife about her children’s paternity. As the answer to a late-night pop quiz question, it appears to be ill-advised.
So we get past that awkward moment in our relationship, Leigh is cutting away and she muses once more, “I wonder why my hair is so different from my sisters’s?”
“Maybe you are adopted…”

Actually, that ended up being the whole thing.  Hope you enjoyed.