El Reg Movember lads sprout mighty Unix beards for cancer charity What is it about facial hair and computing? From the greats of SmallTalk and C++ to Java and Ruby, beards and moustaches are not a rare sight in the world of computer science. James Gosling, Barjne Stroustrup, Alan Kay and Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto have expressed their genius not just through the curly braces in the machine …
"This year, one in nine men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer."
Somehow I don't think so - cancer UK reckon that about 13% of diagnosed cancers are prostate cancer, but that's not quite 1 in 9 of all men (thankfully....)
Actual prostate cancer rates are approx 0.13%
http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/cancerstats/types/prostate/incidence/uk-prostate-cancer-incidence-statistics
...but you may want to read this piece about Movember by the British Medical Journal.
The summary para for those with short attention spans:
Movember does not just seek to raise money but also to “significantly increase the understanding of the health risks that men face and will encourage men to act upon on that increased understanding.” To do this, men need fair and accurate information. Movember’s emphasis on screening tests, its recommendation of a frequency of screening that is not based on evidence, and its failure to provide good supporting information place well intentioned men in unhelpful conflict with their doctors. Meanwhile, the far more pressing concerns of mental illness, alcohol and substance misuse, smoking, and obesity are pressed into near silence. Is this the best we can do for men’s health?
I agree. Doctor's are clearly already at breaking point due to all the female patients having tests for anything and everything (thoroughly researched and evidence-based appointments only of course), and the threat of men actually making use of their services as well is a real problem.
I know that cancer research has a particular month of focus for each of the major cancers, but I'd never really noticed the men-only prostate and testicular cancers as receiving their fair share of public interest. A cursory glance at the telly clarifies why - Children in Need steals the thunder by taking place in November every year.
Why? the public prefer to give their money to kids rather than arseholes
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That being said, don't think I don't support "The Cause". Having lost my mother to cancer only a few years ago I have since donated hundreds of Euro's to cancer research, but not by sporting facial hair.
Check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpe_d%27HuZes
My hero brother climbed it four times last summer, second year he participated.
Hang on should clarify, I do have facial hair, it just dosnt grow above my lip, so I could probably do a Unix beard (if I was stuck on a desert island for twelve years like that crap film where that bloke has a relationship with a beach-ball) but I couldn't do a tash to go with it!
Glad I cleared that up, otherwise some smart Alec will come along and pull me up/off over it!
Oh, so all the mustaches are being grown for charity! Thank god for that I thought it was an outbreak of The Village People virus. What a relief!!
On a serious note, prostate cancer has been linked to a lack of draining the 'nads regularly (seminal vesicles actually) so if you don't have an active partner get a grip on yourself. Castration also helps but is not to everyones liking.
There is common trait : laziness.
Some programmers and administrators are too lazy to repeat things, so they script and schedule and program them instead. For the same reason they also dislike repeatedly shaving their faces, every day.
It was once said that laziness is the greatest virtue in a programmer.
An old colleague that used to work for IBM in the '60s explained it as the self-reinforcing split between sales grunts and nerds. Nerds wanted to have "special" status whereas the salesgrunts resented losing any control of the sale to the nerds. IBM at the time, in common with many upstanding Yank companies, had a very strict dress code for those even likely to come into direct contact with customers and growing beards was definitely outside the norm. Nerds wanting to remain hidden away in the labs grew beards to express their "special" status, and salesgrunts used it as an excuse not to take them onsite. Many sales were made at the time on the golf course, without any real technical representation on the customer's side, and most nerds didn't play golf, and the salesgrunts were happy to keep it that way. Amusingly, as the "beardie" culture spread to include ponytails and other items and means of dress unacceptable to the standard set for salesgrunts, and as the nerds began to have more of a say from the customer side as well, the customer's techies started expecting the salesgrunts to bring along similar techies, to the point where you would hear such conversations as : "we know it's true because their beardie said so, not their sales guy."
The beard & ponytail thing grew out of the Hippie college kids in the '60/'70s in the Bay Area. It wasn't a "special status" thing. It was a "four days in the zone" thing.
The folks with beards didn't give a rat's ass about the face fungus, nor the opinion of the primpy sails-droids. They were more intent on hardware and code. Many went weeks between showers ... This is why nobody (not even me!) wanted to sit next to Steve Jobs at Homebrew Computer Club meetings ...
I never had the beard (my Finn genetics precludes the very concept), but when I left HP my hair was around 4.5 feet long ... On my way out the door, I donated it to the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, to create wigs for cancer kids. I'm called "Baldy" to this day by folks who knew me in that era :-)
Side-note: My office at HP in Palo Alto was 75 feet from Bill Hewlett's. I usually wore Levis & a T-shirt, barefoot, to the office. Bill and Dave had no issues bringing customers in to talk to me ...
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