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What's the airline-industry jargon for unconventional wisdom? Southwest Airlines.

By some estimates, the country's major carriers have consumed perhaps $100 billion in capital during the past decade, but Southwest Airlines continues to be profitable. It's been in the black for 33 consecutive years and, last week, for the 127th consecutive quarter, it paid a modest dividend. Its balance sheet, with about $3 billion in cash on hand and $600 million in available credit, is the envy of an otherwise fuel-price-ravaged industry.

Its competitors among the network carriers—American, United, Delta, Continental, Northwest and US Airways—are shrinking passenger capacity by more than 10 percent and grounding hundreds of aircraft starting in the fall. Southwest will add a handful of daily flights. It will take delivery of another dozen aircraft next year and still plans to grow by 2 to 3 percent. And Southwest now carries more passengers annually (101 million last year) than any other U.S. carrier, a nifty trick for an airline that didn't fly outside Texas at the dawn of deregulation in 1978.

Even the fickle financial markets, which have long discounted Southwest's relentless growth and steady profits, have finally taken note. As oil prices doubled in the past year, share prices of the six network carriers have slid, with the drop-offs ranging from 76 to 94 percent. Southwest's decline has been more modest, within a point of the Dow's 21 percent 52-week drop. As a result, Southwest's market capitalization yesterday (about $9.7 billion) is now more than the combined $5.7 billion market cap of its Big Six competitors.

What does Southwest know that no one else in airlines does? It keeps things simple and consistent, which drives costs down, maximizes productive assets, and helps manage customer expectations.

One Plane Fits All

Unlike the network carriers and their commuter surrogates, which operate all manner of regional jets, turboprops, and narrow-body and wide-body aircraft, Southwest flies just one plane type, the Boeing 737 series. That saves Southwest millions in maintenance costs—spare-parts inventories, mechanic training and other nuts-and-bolts airline issues. It also gives the airline unique flexibility to move its 527 aircraft throughout the route network without costly disruptions and reconfigurations.

Point-to-Point Flying

Network carriers rely on a hub-and-spoke system, which laboriously collects passengers from "spoke" cities, flies them to a central "hub" airport, and then redistributes them to other spokes. Not Southwest. Most of its flying is nonstop between two points. That minimizes the time that planes sit on the ground at crowded, delay-prone hubs and allows the average Southwest aircraft to be in the air for more than an hour longer each day than a similarly sized jet flown by a network carrier. Southwest's avoid-the-hubs strategy also pays dividends in on-time operations. According to FlightStats, Southwest's 78 percent on-time performance in June is eight percentage points higher than the industry average and higher than that of any of its major competitors.

Simple In-Flight Service

Business travelers haven't always loved Southwest's über-simple service, but it's looking better and better as competitors cut back. There is just one class of service, a decent coach cabin that is slightly more spacious than those of Southwest's competitors. There are no assigned seats. There have never been meals, just beverages and snacks. Keeping it basic allows Southwest to unload a flight, clean and restock the plane, and board another flight full of passengers in as little as 20 minutes compared with as much as 90 minutes on a network airline. Airline efficiency experts say that the savings allow each Southwest jet to fly an extra flight per day. Extra flights mean extra revenue.

No Frills, No Fees

As other carriers have rushed to remove perks and pile on fees and restrictions, Southwest has kept its customer proposition streamlined and transparent. The airline only sells one-way fares and only in a few price "buckets." That not only keeps costs down—complex fare structures are expensive to manage—it convinces fliers that they are getting value for money. Prices are all-inclusive too. Southwest doesn't have fuel surcharges, doesn't charge for standby travel or ticket changes, and continues to permit travelers to check two pieces of luggage free. And since every seat on every flight is virtually identical, travelers know exactly what they will get when they make a purchase.

Strong Management

The public face of Southwest Airlines for a generation, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, always-leave-'em laughing Herb Kelleher, finally stepped away from the carrier earlier this year. Kelleher's bonhomie masked the discipline that Southwest has had throughout its history. The airline has always avoided fads and eschewed anything that increased costs or complicated the basic travel proposition. When it has changed—last year it ended its infamous cattle-call boarding process to favor its most frequent fliers and highest-fare customers—it has done so without slowing down the movement of aircraft. Management ranks are lean, but well compensated and, most importantly, productive. I once calculated that the top executives of Southwest generated 10 times more revenue per dollar of compensation than did the C-suite types at some of the network carriers.

A Relatively Happy Workforce

Network carriers have railed for decades about the power of their employee unions. But guess who's the most unionized carrier in the nation? Southwest, of course. The airline says that 87 percent of its employees belong to a union. Southwest has never had a strike, and now that the network carriers have whacked away at salaries and benefits, Southwest staffers are generally the highest paid in the industry. But since Southwest has about 30 percent fewer employees per aircraft than its network competitors, it has the lowest non-fuel C.A.S.M. (cost per available seat mile) of any of the major carriers.

Aggressive Fuel Hedging

Rampaging fuel prices now represent around 40 percent of an airline's costs, but, as usual, Southwest Airlines has been ahead of the curve. Since 1999, the airline's aggressive fuel-hedging program has saved it an estimated $3.5 billion. In the first quarter, for example, it paid $1.98 a gallon for fuel, approximately a dollar less than its network competitors. And Southwest's future position is admirable: It is 70 percent hedged at $51 a barrel through the end of the year and 55 percent hedged at the same price next year.

In a world of $140-a-barrel oil, suggesting that any airline is a guaranteed winner is beyond hubris. But this much can be said: Southwest Airlines is sitting on a pile of cash and fuel hedges and has a proven and easily adaptable service model. And history shows that Southwest has comfortably survived every airline-industry downturn, then grown rapidly and profited hugely when the business cycle turns.

The Fine Print…

British Airways announced last week that it would buy L'Avion, the French carrier that flies all-business-class jets between Newark and Paris. B.A. says that it will integrate L'Avion with its own boutique carrier, OpenSkies, which launched last month. L'Avion was the last of the four independent all-business-class trans-Atlantic carriers that have launched since 2005. The others—Maxjet, Eos, and Silverjet—all folded in the past seven months.

In the 105 years since the Wright Brothers took to the air, dreamers, engineers and aviation buffs have designed every kind of airplane imaginable in a never-ending quest to fly higher, faster or further. Some were innovative, some were beautiful and some even made history. Others, well, let's just say they must have looked good on paper.

Here's a tribute to some of those that surely looked better on paper.

The Concorde gets all the love, but Russia's Tupolev TU-144 was the first supersonic transport and the only commercial plane to exceed Mach 2. The "Concordski" was fast but plagued by bad luck. Three crashes -- including a dramatic mid-air breakup during the 1973 Paris Air Show -- relegated it largely to a lifetime delivering mail. It was mothballed in 1985 but briefly brought back a few years later as a research plane.

The Comet was the premiere commercial jet airliner and a landmark in British aeronautics when it first flew in 1949. Today it's better known for its atrocious safety record. Of the 114 Comets built, 13 were involved in fatal accidents, most of them attributed to design flaws and metal fatigue.

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The “Spruce Goose� was either a brilliant aircraft years ahead of its time or the biggest government boondoggle ever. By far the largest aircraft ever conceived -- its wingspan was 319 feet -- the Spruce Goose was intended to be a military transport plane. But it wasn't finished until well after World War II ended, rendering it both obsolete and irrelevant. It only flew once.

The Zubr was as useless as it was ugly. Not only was it incapable of flying with the landing gear retracted, the airframe was so highly stressed the plane could disintegrate without warning. If that wasn't enough, it couldn't take off with a payload much heavier than a few cartons of cigarettes. The Polish Air Force had a few in its fleet during World War II, but none of them saw combat.

Cool name, lousy plane. Dr. William Christmas didn't know the first thing about planes when he designed one for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and it showed. He didn't think the plane needed wing struts, so of course they fell off during the plane's maiden flight in 1918.

With its carbon-composite construction, unique design and rearward-facing turboprop engines, the Starship was a groundbreaking aircraft. But it was slow, difficult to fly and a bear to maintain. It took to the air in 1989, but Beechcraft only sold a few of the 53 it built.

The Hiller VZ-1 hovercraft must have looked good on paper, because it sure didn't look good in the air. The idea was simple -- a fan provides lift and the pilot steers by shifting his weight. The Defense Department loved it until it saw the Pawnee in flight. It was good for just 16 mph and it tended to be uncontrollable. The project was killed in the late 1950s.

Defense Department projects are famous for cost overruns, and General Dynamic’s flying wing bomber was a doozy. The Flying Dorito was the most troubled of the stealth aircraft projects the Pentagon embraced during the 1980s, experiencing problems with its radar systems and use of composite materials. When the projected cost of each plane ballooned to $165 million, a Secretary of Defense named Dick Cheney killed it in 1991.

With its anemic engine, poor maneuverability and gunner blocking the pilot's view, the B.E. 2 was doomed from the start. German aces had no problem shooting them down during World War II, making it just about useless as a fighter. It had no problems against German Zeppelins, though, so the plane lived out its days attacking them instead.

The XB 15 was the largest plane ever built in the United States until the Spruce Goose came along. The heavy bomber was so massive it had passageways in the wings and bunks for the crew. But big planes need big engines and no one made one big enough to give the XB any kind of speed for its maiden flight in 1937. The plane maxed out at 200 mph, and the U.S. Army Air Corps killed the project. The only XB ever built saw duty as a cargo plane in the Caribbean during World War II.

1908: Kinemacolor, the first successful color motion-picture process is demonstrated at a scientific meeting in Paris.

1908? Really? It seems as if most of the '30s movies were produced in black-and-white, with the occasional color blockbuster like Gone With the Wind. Even the 1940s seemed to reserve color for big-budget productions. Were color movies really around 100 years ago?

Yes. But no.

British inventor Edward Turner actually received a patent on a three-color motion picture process in 1899. The problem is, his system didn't work all that well. He teamed up with Charles Urban, an American expatriate who was already a force in the fledgling British film industry, in 1901. Turner died soon thereafter, and Urban put Albert Smith on the project.

Smith couldn't make Turner's process function and decided in 1906 to try a simpler two-color system using standard black-and-white film. But, instead of exposing the then-standard 16 frames a second, the new process exposed 32 frames. A spinning wheel of transparent filters exposed alternate frames in red and green. A similar wheel was used to project the film, and just as persistence of image makes movie frames merge into seemingly continuous motion, so the viewer's brain merged the two partial-color images into full color.

Sort of. The system was notoriously deficient in presenting blues and getting a true white. And because the red frame and the green frame were shot 1/32 of a second apart, rapid motion caused color fringing where the red and green images didn't exactly overlap. (Not that we've ever seen a digital entertainment technology that blurs with rapid motion. Oh, no.)

Urban previewed the system for the press in London before giving it a scientific debut in Paris, where film pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière attended. Kinemacolor got its name in 1909 and was used to film George V's coronation as emperor of India at the Delhi Durbar in 1912.

The process was more economical than the frame-by-frame hand tinting employed by some producers at the time, which sometimes used stencils to create several hundred color prints for commercial distribution. Kinemacolor also spawned some offshoots, including color-wheel systems that exposed side-by-side, rather than alternating, red and green images.

Kinemacolor had plenty of drawbacks. It was one thing for a top-notch cinematographer to synchronize the spinning color wheel with the camera shutter, but quite another to expect projectionists all over the world to master the complicated system, even if their employers were willing to pay for the expensive equipment. Urban also had to fight patent battles. Then came World War I, which -- besides its tremendous toll in blood -- devastated European economies.

Kinemacolor never caught on in the United States, some say because of opposition from the Motion Picture Patents Co., a trust of producers and film-stock suppliers (namely Eastman) that had huge power in the film industry.

Starting in the late teens, it also had to face a superior technology, one that used stationary prisms instead of moving wheels to film and project color separations. Devised by MIT-trained engineers in Boston, it was called: Technicolor.

Source: Various

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Last month, Google C.E.O. Eric Schmidt, who sits on Apple's board of directors, revealed that he's been compelled to leave Apple board meetings on more than one occasion because Google's mobile-device platform, Android, poses a direct challenge to Apple's iPhone. If Google were to adopt a similar practice of asking its directors with conflicts of interest to step outside, its board meetings might start getting pretty small.

The first to get the heave-ho would be John Doerr, who finds himself on the other side of the Android-iPhone fault line: In March, Doerr launched the $100 million iFund to invest in companies writing applications for the iPhone. If Google's board went on to discuss App Engine, Google's cloud computing initiative, Doerr would again have to excuse himself since he sits on the board of Amazon, whose fast-growing Web-services business competes directly with App Engine.

Should the conversation turn to Google's vigorous efforts to optimize its services for the iPhone, Doerr could return to the meeting. But if talk veered toward Google's plans to acquire wireless spectrum, John Hennessy, who sits on Cisco's board, might have to recuse himself, since Cisco has scrapped publicly with Google over who deserves to get the biggest slice of the new wireless broadband spectrum being auctioned off by the Federal Communications Commission.

Google's venture-capital investments? Sergey Brin should take a walk—after all, his new bride, Ann Wojcicki, is a founder of bio-info startup 23andMe. After Brin returns, perhaps the board would like to address tactics in the pitched battle between Google's Checkout payment service and eBay's PayPal. Might director Ann Mather, who served as a board member for Shopping.com before eBay acquired it for $634 million in 2005, care to head to the cafeteria for a coffee?

Of course, Google isn't deliberately stacking its board with representatives from its competitors. It's just that, as anyone whose business Google has targeted with its ever-expanding arsenal of services knows, there's no escaping the Googleplex. One suggestion: Rather than asking its directors to run hither and thither, Google could have its engineers build a boardroom version of the Cone of Silence from this summer's film version of Get Smart.

I recently gave my old laptop to a friend's 9-year-old daughter. Later, I remembered that I had left some risqué material hidden in an obscure folder. Should I ask for the laptop back or just hope the kid doesn't discover my stash?

Never bet against the inquisitiveness of a child. It might be next month, it might be next year, but eventually the girl will stumble upon your copy of Fondling Sarah Marshall. And when she does, her father may come looking for you with a tire iron. You needn't debase yourself in order to avoid such unpleasantness. "I think it's quite OK to say, 'Gosh, I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I really need the computer back for a day— I left some important files on there,'" says Syndi Seid, founder of Advanced Etiquette, a San Francisco-based training company. Chances are your pal won't press the matter and ask about the nature of those files. If he does, just say they're "work related." He may see through the fib, but he'll likely let it slide — why embarrass the guy who graciously provided his daughter with a free (and soon-to-be porn-free) computer?

Next time, though, do a full hard-drive wipe and OS reinstall before donating your laptop. It's so easy to forget that Grinding Nemo is lurking somewhere in the Drivers folder.

I own a restaurant that just got panned on Yelp. The reviewer called my food "worse than off-brand gruel." I suspect it's a longtime foe with an ax to grind. What should I do about such a fraudulent slam?

Hell hath no fury like a restaurateur scorned, so your inclination is probably to demand that Yelp kill the review. But before you up the ante against your nemesis, consider the consequences of giving in to anger. Because, as Yoda taught us, anger ultimately leads to suffering—or, in your case, to more bad publicity.

No one enjoys being raked over the coals by a pseudonymous commentator, especially when the attacker is motivated by hostility rather than honest dissatisfaction or disagreement. But don't credit your detractor with too much influence. You need to trust in the sophistication of online-savvy consumers—specifically, their ability to see the big picture and factor out aberrant comments. "A single review won't make or break your business," says Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp's cofounder. And that's doubly true, he adds, if the offending one-star viewpoint is offset by a slew of four- and five-star raves. That "off-brand gruel" wisecrack, though nasty, is unlikely to cause your eatery any real harm—unless you are serving off-brand gruel.

Not sufficient comfort? You may still want the review deleted on principle. Yelp, like many other sites with user-generated content, has an appeals process designed to weed out truly malicious postings. If you succeed in expunging the slam, however, your enemy will know he got your goat. And when a bully finds a weakness, he exploits it. Another mean-spirited takedown will surely follow, and then another, and another.

Now's the time to nip that vicious cycle in the bud. Mr. Know-It-All recalls an ancient adage about turning the other cheek. Was that also Yoda? Smart guy.

Is it OK to Photoshop my wedding pictures before I post them on Flickr? I just want to do something about my crow's-feet.

As long as you don't go overboard with the improvements, tweaking your soon-to-be-Flickr'd pics is perfectly copacetic.

Professional wedding photographers, after all, regularly blot out blemishes. "I touch up photos so people look as good in their photographs as they did in real life," says Scott Kelby, editor of Photoshop User magazine, who has shot dozens of weddings. And while such modifications might be verboten in the ethics-constrained world of photojournalism, your nuptials aren't exactly front-page news—no matter what your mother says.

Need help navigating life in the 21st century? Email us at mrknowitall@wiredmag.com.

1936: Henry F. Phillips receives patents for a new kind of screw and the new screwdriver needed to make it work. It changes the worlds of mass production and machine repair, not to mention your home toolbox.

Phillips was a Portland, Oregon, businessman who invented something to solve a problem that few home repair folk or do-it-yourselfers even knew existed. In those days, if you wanted to drive a screw into a hole, you just grabbed the right-size slotted screwdriver and did the deed. The only thing you needed to puzzle over was the size. Too big wouldn't fit; too small wouldn't give you enough torque.

So why do you now need to grab the right kind, as well as size, of screwdriver? It's enough to make you cross.

Phillips wasn't trying to make life with hand tools easier. He was trying to solve an industrial problem. To drive a slot screw, you need hand-eye coordination to line up the screwdriver and the slot. If you're a machine -- especially a 1930s machine -- you ain't got no eye, and your hand coordination may depend on humans.

The Phillips-head screw and Phillips screwdriver were designed for power tools, especially power tools on assembly lines. The shallow, cruciform slot in the screw allows the tapering cruciform shape of the screwdriver to seat itself automatically when contact and rotation are achieved. That saves a second or two, and if you've got hundreds of screws in thousands of units (say, cars), you're talking big time here.

And not only does a power Phillips driver get engaged fast, it stays engaged and doesn't tend to slide out of the screw from centrifugal force. Another advantage: It's hard to overscrew with a power tool. The screwdriver will likely just pop out when the screw is completely fastened.

It turns out that Peter L. Robertson had patented a self-seating, square-socket screw in Canada in 1907. Some Canadian factories adopted it, but Robertson was vexed by the onslaught of World War I and his own insistence on maintaining tight control of the technology.

Phillips applied for his own patents in 1934 and '36. After years of rejection, he got the American Screw Company to spend $500,000 ($5.7 million in today's money) to develop a manufacturing process. Then they convinced General Motors to try the new-fangled fasteners on the 1936 Cadillac.

Presto, change-o. Nearly all American automakers had switched to Phillips screws by 1940. The American jeeps and tanks of World War II, not to mention the aircraft, were assembled with speed and efficiency, thanks in a small part to Henry Phillips.

Today, manufacturers can choose from a wide array of screws -- including the Robertson square, the Allen hex and some exotic varieties developed by the Phillips Screw Co.

If you're a weekend handyperson who has to keep your toolbox stocked with all kinds of screwdrivers (or driver bits), the variety may be annoying. The Phillips cam-out -- when you've gone far enough and the tool pops out of the screw -- has led to plenty of workshop profanity. And loosening a machine-driven Phillips screw with a hand-held screwdriver has apparently reminded many, judging from their language, of the tenacity of a female dog protecting its newborns.

Still, remember Henry Phillips gently. His screws are holding your life together.

Source: American Heritage Invention & Technology

If you go to Japan and tell people you're a blogger, they might assume you're a celebrity. While blogs are making incredible headway as a source of credible information in the United States, in Japan they are mostly thought of as high-profile diaries.

"It's an evolution of Japan's diary culture," which dates back to the 8th century, says Ichiro Kiyota, an editor at Gizmodo Japan. "Celebrities say things on blogs that they can't tell the mainstream media, and we all read it so we can get to know them better."

Japan's celebrity bloggers run the gamut in terms of popularity and topics they write about, but they have several things in common: They're good-looking, they're geeky and they love to blog. Here are our 10 faves.

Name: Shoko Nakagawa

Age: 23

Blog: Shokotan blog

Claim to fame: Japan's new Queen of Blogging makes geeks go wild with her impressive otaku cred.

Traffic: By some estimates 100 million pageviews per month.*

Day job: Actress, singer, etc.

Favorite topics: Nails, cake, cats, cosplayers, cellphone bling, sexy figurines. Most recently, she created worldwide buzz when she put a cat in her mouth.

*Traffic is self-reported unless otherwise specified.

Name: Kaori Manabe

Age: 27

Blog: Kaori Manabe's Between You and Me

Claim to fame: The original Queen of Blogging was one of the first celebrities to exploit the influencing power of the web.

Traffic: N/A

Day job: Actress, book author, former swimsuit model.

Favorite topics: Food she cooks; getting drunk.

Name: Chiaki Kyan

Blog: Kyanchi Everyday

Location: Tokyo

Traffic: 25,000 pageviews per day.

Day job: Bikini idol

Favorite topics: Gundam; her cat; web video sites like Nico Nico Douga and YouTube.

Name: Noriko Saito

Blog: DropB

Location: Tokyo

Age: 25

Traffic: 250,000 pageviews per month.

Day job: Web director of a media company.

Favorite topics: Programming languages, iPhones, 12 reasons why she'd make a good wife (she can program; she's funny; she knows everything about 2channel).

Name: Asami Shinohara

Blog: iGirl

Age: 26

Location: Osaka

Traffic: 120,000 pageviews per month.

Day job: TV show host, manager of AuPair Japan.

Favorite topics: Her blinged-out cellphone; her snack addiction; books she's reading (The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan, Speed Reading Skills for Kings); her desire to be as beloved as a Mac product.

Name: Yumi Fukuda

Age: 25

Blog: Yumiking Diary

Location: Tokyo

Traffic: 13,000 pageviews per month.

Day job: Freelance journalist

Favorite topics: Her new FOMA F906i mobile phone; pictures of her breakfast.

Name: Johnny Kusakabe

Age: 27

Blog: Johnny Kusakabe's Case File

Location: Osaka

Traffic: 3,000 pageviews per day

Day job: Salaryman

Favorite topics: Videogames; outrageous 2channel threads about eating cockroaches. He also has a parody blog called the Shoutan blog.

Name: Yuko Matsumaru

Age: 29

Blog: Matsu-You's Eye

Location: Tokyo

Traffic: N/A

Day job: TV MC, designer, model

Favorite topics: Lacy, romantic pink things (a pink Care Bears pouch, a shiny pink Zima).

Name: Benijo

Blog: Do You Like Geeky Women?

Traffic: N/A

Day job: R&D at a social media consulting firm.

Favorite topics: PHP and MySQL, debugging, making Japan's No. 1 geek databases.

Name: Shuho Saito

Age: 32

Blog: Shuiro Note

Location: Tokyo

Traffic: 5,000 pageviews per day

Day job: Homemaker who used to work at Six Apart.

Favorite topics: Fancy homemade lunch boxes; affiliate links to household items like pots, pans and mixers.

Name: Kamiji Yusuke

Blog: Kamiji Yusuke's Official Blog

Claim to fame: He holds the Guinness World Record for "most unique users on a personal blog in 24 hours."

Traffic: 6 million pageviews per day.

Favorite topics: Posts titled "Um," "Ah" or "Last Night" trigger an instant wave of thousands of comments by fawning fans.

What do you get when you cross scholarly research and dick jokes? Nothing to laugh at, normally. But science writer Jim Holt defies the Heisenberg principle of humor — you can't study it without killing it — in his book Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes. We caught up with him walking into a bar.

Wired: One question you tackle is who invented the joke. Weren't we cracking wise back in the caves?

Holt: No, the classic joke form — setup with incongruity, punch line that resolves the incongruity —seems to have come out of Greece and Rome. There's this guy in Greek -mythology called Palamedes who invented practically everything — numbers, currency, lighthouses, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He also supposedly invented the joke. And, of course, he was stoned to death.

Wired: So where do new jokes come from?

Holt: It used to be that all the jokes I got came from Wall Street. Now, with the Internet, they're sort of everywhere and nowhere at once. But the ideas for jokes are cultural — concepts that keep reappearing in different guises over the centuries.

Wired: There are lots of theories about why we joke. Which do you find most plausible?

Holt: Well, there's the superiority theory, that jokes express scorn for your inferiors — cripples and cuckolds and foreigners and the like. Plato said we laugh at vice. Then there's the Freudian interpretation, that it's all about sexual repression. Finally, there's the seduction theory, based on the observation that men do most of the joking while women do most of the laughing. Christopher Hitchens wrote a piece in Vanity Fair arguing that the only way most guys can impress women is to make them laugh.

Wired: But your favorite explanation is a mashup of Kant and evolutionary biology, right?

Holt: V. S. Ramachandran, the brain researcher, has a theory about the origin of laughter — that when you're in the jungle and there's an apparent threat, the first member of the kinship group to notice that it's not a real threat emits this stereotyped vocalization. And it's contagious, so everyone starts laughing. That's also the basis of the relief theory of humor, that there's a release of the energy you had summoned up to solve some puzzle. Kant said that the essence of humor is a strained expectation dissolving into nothing.

Wired: Did you find any candidates for the perfect joke?

Holt: I did find what might be the shortest possible joke: "Pretentious? Moi?"

Ethoxydiglycol Back in the '50s, home hair dyes were laced with toxic chemicals that turned a simple touch-up into a haz-mat operation. Luckily, dye makers found substitutes like EDG, a fume- free organic solvent that keeps the ingredients in a thin, pourable consistency.

Oleyl Alcohol, Vegetable Fatty Acid That thin, pourable consistency would be problematic during application. Mixing the base with the separate bottle of "color developer" causes these two fatty organic thickeners to kick in, making the product cling to your hair like shampoo.

Ethanolamine In last month's episode of What's Inside, this ingredient starred as a solvent in Easy-Off oven cleaner. Here it's an alkalizer that boosts the pH toward bleachlike levels and swells the hair's outer layer so the color can penetrate more fully.

Erythorbic Acid If you take ascorbic acid — aka vitamin C — and rearrange the atoms just so (isomerization!), you get erythorbic acid. It's a cheaper antioxidant that protects the dye from sun and oxygen damage.

Trisodium EDTA With its ability to bind heavy metals, EDTA is used to clean up after radioactive spills. That same talent is enlisted here to suck up copper in tap water, which might otherwise react with the product to create damaging radicals. Dyed hair is messed up enough already.

Polyquaterium-22 Sounds like a comic- book invention, but this common polymer coats each strand, smoothing the shaft's outer layer and improving lubricity — a fancy way of saying it's a hair conditioner.

p-Aminophenol, p-Phenylenediamine These so-called intermediates react inside the hair fiber to produce the appropriate color when oxidized. This combination turns dark brown. Other chemicals (or different proportions of these) can make any shade — from Sandy Blond to Jet Black.

Resorcinol Is there anything this stuff can't do? It's used as a chemical skin peel, a biological glue for aortic surgery, a sunscreen, a treatment for whooping cough, and — when mixed with the right acids — a TNT-like explosive. In Just for Men, it's a coupler, an additive that reacts with the oxidized intermediates to dial in the target color.

Hydrogen Peroxide When combined with the other ingredients, this ubiquitous denizen of the medicine cabinet provides a superabundance of highly reactive oxygen, which turns those intermediates and couplers into luxurious dark coloring that will surely fool everyone into thinking that this is your natural look.