Snagged this picture of a monarch butterfly on the milkweed before it flew over to the neighbor’s garden

Some very KJV-like language from Colson Whitehead in Zone One:

They would force a resemblance upon it, these new citizens come to fire up the metropolis.

Their new lights pricking the blackness here and there in increments until it was the old skyline again, ingenious and defiant.

🐝🌸

Second painting from yesterday. Super C, 8x10, acrylic on canvas. Name inspired by the NES game of the same name.

First of three paintings I completed today. Lively lemons, 8x10, acrylic on canvas

Got this Apple Extended Keyboard II the other day and it’s a joy to type on, with lots of travel and a productive-sounding thump with each key press. It’s connected via an Apple Desktop Bus-to-USB-A dongle that in turn connects to a USB-A-to-USB-C dongle.

Death, taxes, and baldness—they all loom like anxiety-inducing storm clouds that (usually) aren’t as menacing as they seem, but nevertheless reliably inspire drastic solutions that are both risky and unrealistic. The stakes for curing male pattern baldness (MPB) ¹ in particular are very low, but the afflicted have still been searching for a cure since literally ancient history.

Caesar and Hippocrates

Julius Caesar had gone almost completely bald by the time he met Cleopatra, who recommended to him a homemade topical solution that included icky ingredients such as bear grease. Like 99.9% of all such remedies throughout history, it didn’t work. To compensate, Caesar combed his hair forward and wore a wreath whenever possible.

George Bernard Shaw dramatized this situation in his play Caesar and Cleopatra:

CAESAR: What are you laughing at?

CLEOPATRA: You’re bald (beginning with a big B, and ending with a splutter).

CAESAR: (almost annoyed). Cleopatra! (He rises, for the convenience of Britannus, who puts the cuirass on him.)

CLEOPATRA: So that is why you wear the wreath—to hide it.

Going even further back, the Greek physician Hippocrates was famously bald, such that the hair that conventionally bald men don’t lose—i.e., the continuous patch around the back and sides of the scalp—is called the “Hippocratic wreath.”

But Hippocrates did realize something that even many people today don’t: That MPB is not skin-deep, and as such it can’t be completely solved through topical solutions like the Cleopatra concoction, because they don’t address its root cause, which is systemic and has to do with how testosterone moves through the body. ²

The (literal) root cause of MPB

Testosterone is constantly being converted to a more potent hormone called dihydrotestosterone, or DHT, by an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase (5AR). This sex steroid is vital for development. At the same time, it gets into hair follicles and, if those follicles on the top and front of the scalp are genetically susceptible to MPB, DHT shrinks them.

This process is called miniaturization. The hair follicle narrows, so that each time the hair sheds and grows back as part of the hair growth cycle, it grows back thinner, until it’s so thin it’s invisible to the naked eye.

So baldness isn’t the manifestation of hair falling out, but of hair failing to regrow at its previous thickness. People who aren’t bald have hair fall out every day, too, but it comes back at the same thickness, so there’s no cosmetic difference.

To halt or reverse MPB, any remedy must do one of the following:

• Inhibit T-to-DHT conversion
• Induce hair growth to such a degree that it outstrips the miniaturization process

Moreover, it must work on hair that’s still visible. Indeed, and ironically, the more hair you have, the better the results of any baldness remedy. Subtly miniaturized hair is the prime candidate for a turnaround story, whereas if someone is “shiny” bald, these drugs can’t help them—there needs to be some still-substantial hair remaining to actually save.

What does work, and why

Very few solutions—like, a single-digit number of them—meet those requirements. I’ll run through them now.

5AR inhibitors

There are two drugs in this class:

• Finasteride: Brand name Propecia (1mg, for MPB) or Proscar (5mg, for benign prostatic hyperplasia, or BPH ³)
• Dutasteride: Brand name Avodart, for BPH; not explicitly approved for MPB in the US, but is elsewhere

These drugs dramatically inhibit DHT conversion. Finasteride can reduce DHT levels in serum by over 70%, whereas dutasteride can reduce it by over 90%.

In practice this inhibition means they halt hair loss pretty quickly, but don’t always spur regrowth. And to truly save someone’s follices, a 5AR inhibitor must be taken indefinitely. ⁴

These drugs definitely work, but at what cost? If you do any amount of research on them, you’ll soon learn that physicians think side effects are “rare,” or that they’re most prevalent early on but subside with time. At the same time, there’s a constantly flowing stream of posts on the r/tressless subreddit as well as a similarly steady beat of research articles about how such effects—which are often both psychiatric and sexual—may be both persistent and significantly underreported relative to their actual occurence.

For that reason, there’s been a relatively recent push for topical finasteride, with the logic that if applied directly to the scalp rather than taken by mouth, it’ll have less systemic absorption and therefore fewer side effects. However, even topical variants do lower serum DHT somehow, so it’s unclear whether they’re truly safer, and they seem to be less effective than the systemic options.

Note that if you ever get a modern hair transplant, you may have to take a 5AR inhibitor to preserve the newly moved hair, even though it’s often assumed to be “permanent.”

Minoxidil

In the 1950s, the Upjohn Company began development of what it hoped would be a treatment for ulcers. That treatment, named minoxidil, didn’t work for that purpose, but it was a potent vasodilator and eventually found a niche in the late 1970s as the branded blood-pressure medication Loniten.

Patients taking Loniten noticed hypertrichosis, or rapid hair growth, and it wasn’t long before doctors began prescribing it off-label for MPB. In 1988, it was reformulated as a topical lotion under the brand name Rogaine. Over the next 30 years, Rogaine underwent multiple cycles of refinment, having its strength boosted from 2% to 5%, becoming an OTC medicine, being reformulated as a less-greasy foam, and becoming available as a store brand from basically every chain store that sells medicines of any kind.

Minoxidil preserves and stimulates hair growth in a different way than the 5AR inhibitors do. It’s less effective overall than they are, and it can usually only outrun aggressive MPB for a few years before losing the race. But when administered topically, it has no systemic side effects unless mixed at a double-digit active ingredient concentration, in which case it may cause hypotension. Like the 5AR inhibitors, it must be used indefinitely.

In 2022, The New York Times published an article on a trend that many in the hair loss treatment community had known about for years—taking minoxidil orally at very low doses, instead of applying it topically, because:

• As with 5AR inhibitors, the systemic route is more effective.
• There’s no grease or wetness to deal with in the hair.

The oral route is risky in ways the topical one isn’t, though:

• At such low doses (i.e., <1 mg), it needs to be compounded. Unfortunately, many pharmacists err when compounding, and the dose is too potent, leading to…
• …syncope, weight gain, and fluid retention, all of which are well-known minoxidil side effects that contributed to it being relgated to the less-used tiers of BP medicines long ago.

In brighter news, minoxidil offers a reliable remedy for women, who generally don’t respond to finasteride.

LLLT

Low-level laser (light) therapy (LLLT) is the process of shining a light, often a 650nm ⁵ red one, on an area of the body in hopes of stimulating growth or healing. For hair loss in particular, LLLT devices are designed as either combs or helmets used or worn 3-4 times weekly.

Their mechanism of action is different from the two treatment categories above, which mean that using LLLT in conjunction with 5AR inhibitors and minoxidil is likely to produce the most noticeable overall effects. Apparently, it helps stimulate cell growth and shifts hair into the anagen phase, when it’s still growing and not on the verge of being shed.

Hair grows in an anagen-katagen-telogen cycle. After a hair gets sheds in the telogen phase, it should then restart in the anagen phase. In MPB, it may cease to go back into this phase, or do so only at dramatically reduced width and length. LLLT and minoxidil both seem to reignite and extend the anagen phase.

Of all the treatments outlined here, this is the one that feels the most quack-ish to me. Lasers! To regrow your hair! But the evidence for its efficacy is substantial. It seems to be even more potent than minoxidil and not that far off from the 5ARs.

PRP

Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections involve someone taking a sample of your blood, spinning it through a centrifuge, and then reinjecting the ensuing protein-rich mixture into your body at a target site. The late Kobe Bryant was a pioneer of this treatment, albeit for his knee, not for his hair.

PRP can stimulate cell activity almost anywhere it’s applied, which makes it a popular cosmetic treatment. For hair, it seems to do something similar to LLLT and minoxidil, and it has a leg up on both of them when it comes to convenience—you only need two injections or so a year, instead of a daily or every-other-day regimen.

Herbal supplements and diet

Now we’re in a grayer zone, and nearer to Cleopatra’s “natural” solution. Many naturally-occuring compounds have been proposed as possible baldness cures. Some people even go so far as to say that diet can materially affect hair loss, a claim that doesn’t seem to hold up.

By far the herbal supplement most recommended for MPB is saw palmetto extract, a compound made from the berries of a dwarf palm tree. Hypothesized to work as a perhaps milder 5AR inhibitor without the grim side-effect profile, saw palmetto extract is backed by some evidence, but there’s not definitive proof that it works. Oddly, it seems to work better for MPB than for its more commonly associated use case, BPH.

The future

Baldness treatments can feel like the will o’ the wisp—always just over the horizon but impossible to reach. Hair multiplication, side-effect free topical or oral treatments, gene therapies and so on are always proposed but turn out to be ineffective in real life.

This topic has always interested me because of the diverse range of hair outcomes in my own family, from early onset shiny baldness to troubadour-esque hair into old age. I feel like there’s a lesson here in how despite immense demand and years of research, there still isn’t a foolproof permanent solution to hair loss—in fact Caesar’s own strategy of just wearing a wreath and doing a combover is still simpler, cheaper, and less side effect-prone that anything invented since.

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1. Scientifically, this condition is known as androgenic (or androgenetic) alopecia. ↩︎

2. Hippocrates noticed this because he saw that eunuchs didn’t go bald. ↩︎

3. It works for both conditions because they’re both caused by the effects of DHT. ↩︎

4. This requirement reminds me of the recent weight-loss medications Wegovy and Ozempic, which similarly lose all benefit the moment they’re ceased. ↩︎

5. This is the same wavelength used in CD and DVD players. They’re “optical” discs because they’re read by lasers. ↩︎

The state bird of Illinois (and six other states) keeping watch over someone’s Amazon package

Weird DVD facts:

• They don’t have square pixels, and the pixels have different non-square shapes for NTSC and PAL regions.
• All video is 480i on disc but can be re-interleaved to 480p if progressive scan flags exist.
• They don’t run at 24 frames per second for movies (they use 3:2 pull-down).

She likes this toy from 🇯🇵

Thirsty 🐈 I thought of this segment from Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott:

She lives with little joy or fear.

Over the water, running near,

The sheepbell tinkles in her ear.

Before her hangs a mirror clear

The Super Mario Bros. Movie was better than I expected:

• Fast-moving: I’d forgotten the joy of a 90-minute film.
• Beautifully animated: The 🌈 road sequence!
• Deep references: E.g., the Mario v. DK fight echoed the 1981 Donkey Kong.

Now time for some Donkey Kong (1994) on my Analogue Super NT.

This beer manages to taste smooth and almost sweet despite being 9.5% ABV.

Glimpsed this faint🌈 over Super H Mart last night

These Chicago-style hotdogs were really good:

• poppy seed bun
• dill pickle spear
• neon green sweet relish
• sport peppers
• chopped white onion
• tomato slices
• yellow mustard
• celery salt

A handful of Game Boy games can, when connected to a Super Nintendo/Famicom (SNES/SFC) via a Super Game Boy/2, use the SNES/SFC hardware to play back a soundtrack that would’ve been beyond the audio capabilities of the Game Boy hardware. Here are three such games:

• Toy Story
• A Bug’s Life
• Animaniacs

Loved this tree at my doctor’s office.

Dolby Atmos is having a moment. Although the immersive audio format dates back to the first term of the Obama administration ¹, for most of its life so far it’s only really been known to the niche audiences of movie/home theater enthusiasts and Blu-ray Disc collectors.

That changed with its adoption by Apple Music. Anyone subscribed to the service can stream any Atmos-encoded songs in its catalog, at no extra charge. Along with lossless quality ², Atmos is a key differentiator for Apple Music from Spotify, which right now supports neither of those enhancements.

The Atmos basics

Now here’s the tough part: What is Atmos?

Even as someone who’s been immersed (pun intended) in its world since the early 2010s, I still struggle to explain it to most people. Fundamentally, it’s metadata embedded in a Dolby TrueHD or Dolby Digital Plus stream, with information about where a sound (codified as an “object”) should be played relative to other sounds within a 3-D map of a theater or home. The New York Times (gift link below) offered a pretty straightforward explanation this month:

Dolby Atmos, introduced in 2012, was initially developed for movie theaters and the home theater market. Because it offers a wider palette than stereo, and differs from traditional 5.1 and 7.1 channel setups, Atmos allows engineers—typically mixing across a dozen or more speakers—to put sound sources in front, to the side, behind and even above the listener.

So:

• More, more, more: It’s more complicated than stereo (i.e., two channels), with the ability to assign over 100 total objects in any direction. Accordingly, to get Atmos playback, everything in the chain—the master recording, the delivery service (such as Apple Music), and the playback equipment—must support its proprietary technology. The simplest setup for most people will be Apple Music plus AirPods; a more complex setup would be something like a 4K Ultra HD movie with Atmos soundtrack, a compatible disc player, and an Atmos/capable home theater.
• Spatiality: It emphasizes spatial audio that comes from multiple directions at once and/or moves around in a seemingly “3-D” way. For example, with AirPods on, if you set your phone flat on a table and then walk around it, it’ll feel like the vocals in the song (if it has them) are hitting your ears from different directions as you move—a good demonstration of how Atmos always maintains relative spacing between its objects.

Still, when I first heard about Atmos in 2014, I wasn’t clear how it differed from the (also-immersive) surround sound setups that movie and home theaters had used for years. But there are both subtle and overt differences:

Subtle

Atmos consists of audio “objects” that are specified as rectangular coordinates within a specific three-dimensional space, such as a theater or a sound system.

For example, Object A can be mixed to be “above” Object B, and so when it comes out of the speaker system it’ll seem like it’s coming from a very different source location.

The key is the relative positioning of such sounds as coordinates in 3-D space. This design means that Atmos content isn’t locked to or defined by presence in specific discrete channels, which can seem like a benefit or a drawback depending on your perspective:

• On the “benefit” side, you don’t need speakers that are in a specific configuration, e.g. center, rear-left, surround/right, and so on, because Atmos is adaptive and can keep sounds in the right relative spacing even when coming from a single Atmos-enabled speaker, which may use drivers to send sounds in distinct directions. In this way, Atmos allows for simplified setups.
• On the “drawback” side, it’s an open question if the simulated surround sound (basically, the sensation of sounds moving around in coordinated space despite only coming from a somewhat simple set of speakers or even headphones) they get from Atmos is a good or even close approximation of the 6 or 8 discrete channels on a traditional setup.

Overt

If someone knows anything about Atmos, they know that it has vertical channels. Many Atmos soundbars have speakers on the top, to fling audio toward the ceiling.

Helicopter sounds are a famous Atmos use case, because the verticality that Atmos allows can make it seem like the sounds of the rotating blades are coming from directly above you.

There is a rival technology called DTS:X that works virtually the same way.

But is it worth it?

Whenever a new commercial sound format like Atmos comes along, I feel like it’s healthy to be initially skeptical of it. That’s because these innovations are often presented as offering, at great cost, richer sound that meets the standards of self-proclaimed “audiophiles,” whose claims—about how you can hear sounds with noticeable improvements in clarity solely via better encoding and playback technology—unfortunately usually lack strong evidence.

It’s fine to be an audiophile about something like noticeable background noise on a podcast ³ or heavy distortion on a song that’s been mastered so “hot” that even listening to it on a low volume can hurt your ears. But audiophile arguments about basically any of the following strike me as shaky:

• Lossless audio: It’s a lot of extra data for virtually no change in perceived quality.
• “Hi-res” anything: Movies like Akira pioneered really high sample rates (the so-called “hypersonic effect”) that like the above don’t seem to sound any better than more modestly produced audio.
• Super Audio CD/DSD: A failed format/technology that offers much higher bitrates than CD as well as 5.1 surround. Blind listening tests couldn’t identify SACD vs CD at any rate above chance, i.e., of flipping a coin. The 5.1 piece is different, because that is distinct from stereo-only CDs, but playing back a 5.1 SACD mix is almost impossible without a Blu-ray player with 6+ RCA jacks.
• “3-D” sound: This is the marketing lingo around Atmos and it seems strange if only because our world is 3-D already and we hear sounds from different points constantly.

The truth is that the human ear has a very limited frequency range, especially compared to animals such as cats, and this range deteriorates with age. Stereo CD audio, which is 16-bit with a 44,100 Hz ⁴ sampling rate and a 20 Hz to 20 KHz frequency response, is already beyond the range of what a human adult can perceive

Side note: Vinyl and tape are far worse in this respect, so yes the CD really was a big breakthrough and an exception to the audiophile skepticism outlook I proposed above. It allowed for more dynamic range—there are bass frequencies I can hear on the CD version of the Captain Hollywood Project’s Animals Or Human that I can’t hear on the vinyl—and it also doesn’t degrade with each listen like analog media do.

We also only have two ears. Stereo sound is usually superior to mono, at least for music (podcasts are a different story) for this reason. I’m not clear that a similar jump can be made with spatial audio, and one of the audio engineers interviewed by the NYT had similar thoughts:

She noted that there are evolutionary and biological reasons that sound sources coming from behind and above listeners can be unsettling or anxiety inducing. She also observed that music is a potent form of communication in large part because the consummatory phase happens entirely in the listener’s head. Having clearer and more sound sources can actually make it harder to know what to pay attention to.

My own experience listening to Atmos has been that it seems cool sometimes—I liked how the voices and sound effects were spaced in the mix on George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing—but overall it seems a lot like old stereo (on headphones) or surround sound (in home theaters) to me.

On headphones

AirPods are still relying on just two speakers to deliver their 3-D sound. The upcoming Apple Vision Pro may go further, but I mostly agree with the quoted interviewee that we may be getting a lot more audio information that we won’t know what to do with and that won’t enrich our listening experience.

In home theaters

Setting up a proper home theater is difficult. I had to place the speakers in my 5.1.2 (that’s five channels plus one subwoofer and two Atmos height channels) system strategically, ensure that I was using the HDMI eARC port correctly, and learn about how Dolby TrueHD differed from Dolby Digital Plus ⁵.

“Wait, timeout” you’re probably saying. “I thought Atmos was supposed to replace 5.1 and 7.1?”

It is, sort of—Atmos offer the potential for an immersive surround sound-like experience with fewer speakers and configurations, but it can also be supported on newer iterations of the same types of complex home theater systems it’s positioned as an alternative to.

On such systems, Atmos to my ears doesn’t differ much from the old 5.1 or 7.1, with the exception of occasional vertical sounds. People in the market for simple Atmos home sound systems (e.g., a 2.1 soundbar with Atmos) were probably never going to set up a 5.1 or 7.1 system, so Atmos really is something new and exciting.

The proprietary march goes on

Dolby Atmos is proprietary technology from a company whose business model Knives Out cinematographer Steve Yedlin has called “charging for extra signal processing.”

A cynical take on Atmos would hold that it’s all part of a scheme to make even the act of listening to music on headphones more expensive and exclusive. It’s off a piece with the removals of standard headphone jacks from phones. The implication will be that you can’t get the “full” experience without a full Atmos sound chain.

I’m not sure I’m that cynical yet. However, I do think Atmos is akin to other diminishing-return innovations such as 4K HDR and the Apple Vision Pro, in that it seems to oversell itself because its predecessors (stereo audio, 1080p video, and the smartphone, respectively) are still more than good enough for the use cases it purports to solve. It’s a fascinating concept but its biggest effects seem to be not on how much people enjoy what they’re hearing and seeing, but on the creation of long meta-takes and explainers like this one and the NYT piece.

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1. I like to phrase time this way because it makes it seem much longer ago than if I’d just said “11 years ago.” ↩︎

2. Lossless audio, like that on a CD, almost always sounds no different than a lossy MP3. ↩︎

3. I’ve struggled with this issue myself. GarageBand has some plugins that help but my recording environment is just not soundproof enough. ↩︎

4. 44,100 is the product of the squares of the first four prime numbers (2, 3, 5, and 7). ↩︎

5. For example, you can’t carry TrueHD on a S/PDIF optical or coaxial cable. ↩︎

My original 1998 cart of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX for Game Boy, running on an Analogue Super NT via a Super Game Boy 2, a 🇯🇵 only successor to the original SGB with accurate playback speed and a new link port.

• 1080p
• 8:7 aspect ratio overall
• 10:9 aspect ratio for the game itself

Nap time