Email from me to my mom, earlier this week:

I’m getting my haircut today after work. Want to hear some of my ideas about the whole thing? Yes? Oh good.

Years of experience has shown that the amount of times between haircuts for me is fairly constant, meaning that time has demonstrated that good haircut or bad, too short and hard to deal with or too long and annoying, I still only get it cut about twice, maybe three times a year. So I spend a little while loving my haircut, most of my time tolerating it, and some time hating it.

So if you think of your optimal hair length as a bell curve, the perfect haircut would be at the top, the tolerating would be one standard deviation out, the hating another deviation after that, and then just disgusting would be the tails.

Thus this begs the question: why do I get my hair cut to the optimal length?! If I consistently wait about a deviation and a half to cut my hair, why do I cut it so that I’m guaranteed to spend time in the “hating deviation.” Logic says that I should cut it too short so that I can spend all of my time in the “tolerating deviations” that surround the optimal length.

Now I recognize that maybe there is a flaw. Maybe too short hair is less tolerable than too long hair? But what is the ratio of irritation? I don’t know. But I’m hypothesizing that as long as the too short still fits in a ponytail that the difference is minimal. Let’s say it’s twice as irritating. In which case I should get my haircut maybe a half deviation below optimal to try to keep my level of satisfaction relatively consistent on both sides of the perfect haircut.

My Mom’s response:

Just another thought — more frequent haircuts? It really is a rather pleasant experience, especially if you see Michael….

Me:

More frequent??? Pish posh. That just seems like a waste of money when you can get effective results with some statistical reasoning…

Mom:

It may not be a bell curve. Given the fact that your haircut schedule is a rare event and unpredictable, we may be Poisson territory here. So think about that. And if it is bell, narrowing the interval with more frequent cuts is reasonable.

Conclusions:

1. Isn’t my mom awesome?! Seroiusly, throwing out Poisson distributions…it still makes me ridiculously happy. Yay for statistics!
2. I am a nerd.  (the apple didn’t fall far from the tree?)
3. I hate doing my hair.

It turns out that I decided to chop it all off, not so much of statistics but because I feel like I’ve had the same haircut for about 5 years and I wanted a change. It doesn’t fit in a ponytail anymore and I am STRUGGLING. But I do like it a lot, even if I now have to blowdry every day.