Apologies to regular followers of my blog for the relative dearth of content lately, and especially the shortage of pop-science posts.
Today's post will continue in that vein, and be about superstition, hockey, and undergrads.
Most hockey fans are familiar with the concept of a play-off beard. Basically, if you are a hockey player, and your team is in the championship rounds of play, you grow a beard. Typically, this is seen as some sort of team bonding (and maybe superstition) thing.
Has anyone noticed that undergrads do the same thing around exam time? I mean, wandering around Berkeley this week, you would swear that it was
Stanley cup season, and that the San Jose sharks (our "local" NHL team) had just signed thousands of scrawny, glasses-wearing forwards.
This probably has less to do with team bonding (since Berkeley's "official" policy is that undergrad exams are not a team excercise, although I have seen some students attempting to make them more collaborative, often with poor results for all involved), and more to do with sheer laziness.
Whatever the reason, I propose the term "play-off beard" to refer to the general air of unkemptedness one sees in undergrads around exam time. Any takers?
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