Soft Arts

In the first part of 2008, our son Isaac, who had never had a hair cut in his life, started losing all of his hair. Although we took Isaac in for a battery of tests and blood work, no one could really explain what had happened. Isaac went completely bald, and also lost his eyebrows and eyelashes.

Although we still don’t know exactly what happened to him, Isaac’s hair grew completely back over the next year and a half. I finally decided to post this series of pictures because, having visited the sites of numerous families trying to support their children through this affliction, I felt that we need to do our part and make our story available for people in the same situation as our own.

No one is really certain what triggered this, except that our family suffered repeated bouts of the flu lasting up to 3 or 4 weeks during the fall and winter of 2008. Evidently severe depression of one’s system can result in the death of hair follicles. Eventually, as the body recovers, new follicles can appear, which push out the old ones, resulting in an intermediate period of some degree of hair loss.

What is particularly interesting about this condition (if it was actually what Isaac was enduring) is that your hair doesn’t fall out until you’ve actually begun recovering. By the time we saw what was happening and took him in for his blood work he was, by all accounts, healthy as a horse.

Anyway, on with the photo log.

October 13th, 2007 (3 years old, 4 days before his 4th birthday)

February 21st, 2008 (4 years old)

This is one of the last pictures we have of Isaac with all of his hair intact.

April 3rd, 2008 (4 years old)

By now Isaac’s hair had been noticeably thinning for over two months.

May 7th, 2008 (4 years old)

Isaac and I finally agreed to shave his head. His eyebrows are almost completely gone by now.

May 28th, 2008 (4 years old)

Total baldness. No eyebrows or eyelashes at this point. Despite this, he remains an extremely well adjusted little boy, with excellent health, athleticism, and attitude.

September 1st, 2008 (4 years old)

As can be seen in this picture, there was no real change in Isaac’s condition, even after more than three months. At this point I was personally pretty much resigned to the idea that Isaac was going to be completely hairless for the his entire adult life and was working hard to accept this for what it was.

January 1st, 2009 (5 years old)

Isaac’s hair is clearly starting to come back in several places, although the the coverage is still very sparse.

January 21st, 2009 (5 years old)

March 31st, 2009 (5 years old)

Our son has eyebrows again!

October 17th, 2009 (6th birthday)

Although it is shorter than he used to wear it, Isaac’s hair has come back completely. The only abnormality we’ve seen in the last two months was when he got irritated with his bangs and decided to cut them himself.

October 17th, 2009 (6th birthday)

Our boy Isaac, modeling the new astronaut’s flight suit his got for his birthday.

When I read articles like last year’s Apple iPhone Doomed To Failure — Windows Mobile 7 Plans For 2009 Leaked, which predicted that competitors would rush in to dominate the iPhone’s market share, I find myself reflecting on the history of the iPhone with the awe that an acolyte has in the presence of a grand master. Because the competition was beaten before they even understood what was happening to them.

When Apple introduced the iPhone, they won the game in a single move - the perfect checkmate. Although the iPhone was arguably not perfect, by the time it was announced, Apple had already maneuvered its pieces in such a way that, by the time the other players saw the move, it was already too late for them to do anything about it.

I’m not referring to iPhone’s dominion over Windows Mobile 7 - Ballmer and his cronies will shoot themselves in the foot enough to ensure that it’s never any real threat, as history has already shown - I’m talking about its dominion over the entire mobile phone market.

Plans within plans, wheels within wheels

Apple spent years getting the design for the iPhone nailed, and they considered everything that was wrong with conventional mobile phones, and worked the problem until they had a solution that addressed those issues. They clearly understood how large of an effort the iPhone would require, and made a commitment to that effort years in advance of its release. I am certain that the amount of money, thought, and effort that Apple invested in the platform significantly outstripped anything their competitors had done previously, and perhaps since.

The extent of Apple’s efforts, and the remarkable patience and secrecy they practiced while getting things into place, paid off incredibly well for them.

End game

Because of that effort, since the iPhone was released, everyone else has been struggling to play catch up, and no one has really come close. Apple raised the bar higher than anyone else had before, and by the time the competition realized how much of an effort would be required to seriously compete, the public had already turned to them to see how they would meet Apple’s threat.

Being in the public eye, and forced to react, no competitor is really going to be able to put in the years of time required to offer Apple any serious competition. Everyone is reacting and trying to get something out the door as quickly as possible. I think that this is very well illustrated by the BlackBerry Storm, probably one of the most notorious handsets ever released by RIM. Perhaps it was the need for a fast response, or perhaps it was arrogance on the part of RIM, but there was no way that the Storm could ever be considered serious competition for the iPhone.

The Palm Pre: One notable, noble effort

One camp that has earned my admiration is Palm, the only company that I appears to have been desperate enough to try and put in the time required to produce any real competition. While I don’t think that the Pre is serious competition for the iPhone, it is definitely a commendable and respectable effort.

What next?

Despite Mitchell Ashley’s claims to the contrary, no one has seriously found a way to compete with Apple’s skyrocketing market share, except perhaps through attempting to offer more liberal application sales policies in an effort to woo more third party developers.

I have long maintained the RIM and Microsoft have always shot to deliver a product *just* good enough that people will pay for it and not demand their money back. I’m wondering at this point if they’re ever going to be willing to duplicate the effort Apple put into the original iPhone and try and beat them where Apple is strongest, or if they’re just going to keep phoning it in (pardon the pun).

At present it looks like they’re sticking with phoning it in - just pumping out crap and subsisting on the money of people too cheap or indiscriminate to know the difference, or enterprises that have already committed to infrastructure changes that lock customers into their brand.

If the meteoric rise of Apple’s market share is any indicator, that market ain’t working, boys.

This is pretty much straight from Ringworld and is basically a paraphrasing of the monoculture problem, but here goes: The more dependent a society is on a single technology, the more devastated it can be if that technology is destroyed.

As a result, it seems necessary to have contingency plans for technologies we adopt (computers, operating systems, power sources, etc) that may be rendered unusable in unforeseen events. We can not allow our society’s infrastructure to collapse as a result of such a catastrophe.

People, let’s face it. Global warming is happening.

That’s a trickier matter. The earth has been much colder, and much warmer, than it currently is. The razor-thin sample of time which we refer to as “recorded history” is hardly a big enough sample to determine what the earth’s “normal” climate is. We just know what we are used to.

The ice at the north and south poles is melting. Asking whether or not it is linked to global climate change is fatuous. YES, the climate is changing, that’s why it is unseasonably cold in Seattle right now, and it is probably why weather patterns have been so disrupted for the last 15 years (El Nino? Katrina? Remember those?).

The real questions are: how much of what we are seeing is being caused by human beings, would this be happening without us, and is there anything we can do to stop it?

This is hardly the main reason I use Numbers over Excel, but I noticed this awhile back and it gave me a warm fuzzy: the cell formatting dialog has the number 42 (the answer to life, the universe, and everything) showing in it, presumably as an homage to the late, great, Douglas Adams.