I am thinking deep thoughts... wait, I smell wood burning.

To counter all the superstition flowing about today, I figured I'd talk a bit about the science of beard growing.

Most people reading this are probably familiar with the term "light year," the distance it takes for light in a vacuum to travel in one year. This distance is approximately 9.460730 x 10^15 meters, or 5.878630 x 10^12 miles. This is a very long way.

What does this have to do with beard growing? Well, it turns out that there is an equivalent term for very small distances called a "beard second." This is the distance that the average physicist's beard grows in one second (presumably not in a vacuum, unless said physicist has a space suit). The actual measurement of this distance is under some dispute: some say it is 5 nanometers; others say it is 100 Angstroms, or 10 nanometers. I've also seen 3-5 nm.

So, math time. Let's assume we're all average physicists. In addition, I'll assume that we all shaved at the crack of midnight, November 1st. So at midnight tonight, given 86,400 beard seconds/day * 13 days we will each reach 1,123,200 beard seconds. Assuming a beard second is about 5 nanometers, we've generated about 5,616,000 nanometers of beard, or 5.616 millimeters, a piece. And at about 10,000 hairs in the average beard, if you lined up all those hairs, it would be a giant hair 56.16 meters long.

So gentlemen, despite all appearances to the contrary, we've been busy. Proved by science! And math!