Hair @ MindSay

Because having my own blog on my very own domain is just easier these days...
I colored my hair this morning.

surprise, the weather has changed and I am sick. awesome.
i cant breathe through my nose and I have a headache and I hate everything.
I feel a little better after my bath.

typing of baths, my hair is starting to get better. I bought some really good conditioner and I've only used it twice and my hair is repairing itself. Awesome. I should be able to dye it next week and I am not going to bleach it again for AT LEAST a month. my poor hair.

BIG EXCITING NESS!!!! new season of venture brothers starts tonight!!! happyhappyhappyyy

…I don't know if I'll shave/cut my hair off anymore. I looked into it last night, and it's going to be really expensive: the store I looked up in town sells wigs, and they START at $240, and on top of that I would need a cap underneath it, special shampoo and hairspray, a wig stand, a special comb, etc. This is the main thing holding me back. If it weren't for the cost I would be more likely to do it.

 

Plus there’s my graduation this year, and I don't want a wig to fall off my head while dancing or anything.

 

I guess I'll just keep my hair as it is. However, I'm going to take better care of it and buy the damn $40 shampoo that fixed my friend’s hair. Plus I'll be trimming my hair a lot more.

 

I still hate the colour though. The brown faded to a gross blonde, and I want it back to my natural colour, but I don't want to put anymore dye in it for a while. I might dye it once I fix my hair a bit more and get it healthy...but that'll probably take a couple months.

 

Sorry for being vain.

 

-Kristal

My hair needs to go.

It’s just awful. It's fried due to all my dying and straightening and not taking care of it. It's also a really gross shade of blonde (the brown I got done last month has faded out). I don't see any more reason to keep it, especially since I have bald spots due to trich. And it'll take months before I can comfortably leave my hair down without being self-conscious about my bald spots. But who says that I won't pull a new bald spot by then? I figure that shaving my head (or cutting it less than a cm, same difference in my mind, really) will be a new beginning for me, and the hair that grows in will be my natural colour, and healthy. My hair right now is like straw...the same colour and everything. I can't stand to even look at it never mind touch it. In fact, I've been pushing it all back into a ponytail, and using a headband for my bangs because I can't stand to even touch my face. I hate it.

 

Of course when I do this (which will be within a month) I will be wearing a wig all the time, because no matter what I'm still self-concious and won't have the guts to show my bare head in public. But I still take this as a way to improve my self-confidence and have a new beginning.

 

Unfortunately, my parents don't see it that way. About an hour ago I brought out the phone book and my parents asked me why.

"Because I'm calling a place,” I told them
"What place?"

"A wig store."

"Ohhh stop it!" they said.

 

And from there was an argument. Not much of one really. The main thing they kept saying was "It's foolish!" But whenever I asked why they never gave a reason. Why is it foolish for me not to have security-blanket hair?

Why is it foolish for me to want to have a new beginning and help my trichotillomania?

Why is it foolish for me not to waste money on hair dye and products to try and “fix” my hair when I could just cut it off and have natural healthy hair?

 

Ok, granted, wigs are 250 dollars or more, but I'll be using it all the time once I buy it, and seeing it as “dollars per use”, it's not that bad. And this will probably be a one-time deal: I've learned my lesson about excessive hair dying. And once I shave/cut my hair really short, I won't have any to pull. I see it as an advantage for me to not have hair at this point. I don't see why my parents think having a shaved head as a bad thing. It's hair, not an arm or a heart. I can live without it.

 

The funniest thing in that argument was when my mom said "You're going to need your hair for the winter!"

Jeeze...I know we have really cold winters, but this is my first time hearing about deaths among people with shaved heads, lmao.

 

Regardless of their opinions, I will be doing this once I can get a wig. It'll boost my self-confidence and get rid of my vain “ways”. After all, I am not my hair. I don’t understand why they think I am. Are they going to be ashamed of having a daughter with a shaved head? If so, that’s really pathetic. I’m already half way there with my bald spots, why not just “finish the job”? Or am I supposed to wait till I pull it all out? Sure, I haven’t pulled in 9 days, but that doesn’t mean I won’t again. I’d like to think that I won’t pull, but this is an “addiction” and relapse is very much possible.  

 

-Kristal St. Jean

 

The New hair battery technology

Researchers at the Universties of Miami, Tokyo and Tohoku have discovered a new form of laptop battery. Charged by the application of a very strong magnetic field, the Magnetic Tunnel Junction (MTJ) contains a set of nano-magnets - zones some 5 nanometers across in a zinc-gallium-arsenic-mangnesium matrix - which absorb energy and then release it over time. Although the effect had been predicted, the size and duration of the result was not "We had anticipated the effect, but the device produced a voltage over a hundred times too big and for tens of minutes Apple A1148 , rather than for milliseconds as we had expected," said one of the researchers. "That this was counterintuitive is what lead to our theoretical understanding of what was really going on."

The MJT is the top part of the illustration, and is roughly the same diameter as a human hair compare to Toshiba laptop battery. Beneath that is a magnified image of the central part of the device: the white spots are atoms, and the circles contain the nano-magnets that store the power. Picture: Phan Nam Hai/University of Miami

I've yet to dig out the paper in Nature to find out how far this is from being useful as a power source - as the current device is a few hundred micrometers across with IBM laptop battery, it's not going to be storing megawatts. But it's the sort of thing that could be created in vast arrays, like any semiconductor device, and if they're getting to the bottom of the underlying physics then the same effect could be used in many different configurations of Thinkpad Z60T battery. What may be much more interesting than just power storage is the fact, mentioned almost in passing in the press release, that the current delivered by the MTJ is spin-polarised; the electrons are predominately spinning in one direction.

That's hot news for spintronics, which we've covered previously and which, together with graphene, has the most exciting potential for fundamentally new computational devices. Spin logic could work much faster at much lower power than even today's finest electronics Dell laptop battery, because it doesn't rely on currents flowing and the consequent unavoidable loss.

And, as the researchers say, if this discovery leads to new insights into basic magnetic theory, there are almost no limits to how profoundly it could affect modern life with these Thinkpad R40 battery . Which is a bit over the top - just not that much.