Razors and Computer Chips

[yesthattom]

I don't think I'm obsessed with shaving. I mean, it's not like I've ever visited a web site dedicated to the history of Schick razors but I have noticed that the number of blades on a safety-razor cartridge is increasing at an amazing rate.

When I was young I remember seeing adverts trying to convince people that two blades were better than one. The commericials had animations, smiling people, and near-nudity... all on prime time TV. Very exciting.

The late 90's were an exciting time. The "dot com" boom was starting, the economy was going great, it was an exciting time. Part of this excitement was, of course, the introduction of the Mach 3 and later the Mach 3 Turbo. Life was good.

When the Mach 3 came out, I thought, "Gosh, it took 57 years to go from 1 blade to 2, but only 28 years to go from 2 blades to 3. That's an amazing accelleration of growth! I wondered how long before we'd be graced with the 4-blade razor. Following the current trend, it shouldn't be introduced until at least 2011.

The accellerated power increases in silicon chip technology is called "Moore's Law": The observation, made in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, that computer memory chips had doubled in capacity every 18-24 months; this trend has continued ever since the observation. He reasoned computing power would rise exponentially with time.

Now if shaving technology was to also observe Moore's law, there were amazing social and political ramifications. For example, would computer users be more cleanly shaved than non-computer users? The mind boggles.

People's boggled minds were interrupted in 2003 when Wilkinson stunned the world and released the Quattro which has 4 blades, beating Moorse's Law by almost a decade. Bite that, Gordon!

Amazingly, the world has not caught on. However, the www.wilkinson-quattro.com" web site should go a long way to fix that. It is so impressive, you'd think they're annoucing a cure for world hunger, cancer, and AIDS, all in one pill.

Here's a chart of the shaving progress:

Year	# of Blades
1915	1
1971	2
1998	3
2003	4

And a graph:

I'm wondering if my mathematically accellerated friends could help me produce a trend prediction of what year we could expect 100 blades. I think that would be the coolest thing ever.

Comments

[origamislayer.livejournal.com]

'Of course it will not end there. I bet an urgent memo has already gone out in Gillette's marketing department. "Hold some focus groups immediately!" it says. "Find out what number comes after four!"'
-- Dave Barry

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61952-2003Jul15?language=printer

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'll add that link to my website's version of this doc.

[nulldevice.livejournal.com]

Check your table tags. My friends view is misbehaving on your post.

[rampling.livejournal.com]

Mine too.

[jss]

Mine three. Bad Tom. No biscotti.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Fixed. It was a missing close TD tag.

Oddly enough... after posting this I immediate checked to make sure it didn't mess up LJ since I've had that problem in the past. It didn't affect my style, but it did affect yours. Quite odd.

this might be tongue in cheek.....

[ex-mommabear187.livejournal.com]

but as a transwoman who actually cannot tolerate electrolysis well, the Quattro is a f-ing godsend :) I was SOOOOOO happy when I found a 4 blade razor out there....

Re: this might be tongue in cheek.....

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I completely agree! I actually DO look forward to the 5-blade razor :-)

Surely you saw it

[mrfantasy.livejournal.com]

The Daily Show</em a few days back where Rob Corddry demonstrated the 10-blade razor. It spun around like a gyrating hydra. Stephen Colbert said he's back on solid food now.

Re: Surely you saw it

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Yup. That was part of my inspiration. However, I really really really did think about this years ago when the Mach 3 came out.

So, you know math better than me. Can you help me calculate the trend and produce a graph showing it?

Re: Surely you saw it

[mrfantasy.livejournal.com]

Well, it depends.

If we include the Corddry 10-blade, this is going to be a sort of exponential out of control growth such that by, say, 2050, the entire planet will have to be nothing but razor blades. (I could run the numbers for you if you like.)

It's just curve fitting. I guess any decent stats package would give you information.

Re: Surely you saw it

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Got a stats package?

I tried the MS-Excel equivalent, and found that it only does linear stuff. It has tips for leveraging it to do exponential growth, but I couldn't interpret the directions.

[jss]

Math is hard?

[rmd.livejournal.com]

i'd think somewhere in that graph it might be useful to list the introduction of cartridge type safety razors instead of the regular safety razor type, since that's one of the things that made double-blades really possible.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

If you find me the data, I'll add it to the graph.

[libitina]

Back in the wee early days of Saturday Night Live, one of their very first faux commercials was for a four blade razor.

I can't find any indication, however, of such commercials being archived on the net.

[grendelgongon.livejournal.com]

Hi Tom :) I couldn't resist. In Excel you can fit log and exponential trendlines (just go to Chart/Trendline and add what you want. Recoding the data to "number of years following the first blade's introduction" vs "number of blades more than one" and fitting a log model gives

y = 30.186Ln(x) + 57.638
R2 = 0.949 (good fit)

Solving for 9 (10 blades) gives about 2039, but the curve on this simple model flattens rather too slowly so one might expect it to be conservative.

I just sent an Excel spreadsheet for you to play with :)

Jer