Pertaining to b) I can recommend the beard. It not only helps keep out the cold, it also serves to impart wisdom to anyone who can be bothered to listen and that includes me. And possibly, although this may be entirely spurious, it gives you Samson-like strength. That's better than Samsonite strength because you can bring down temples of prejudice and whatnot with it.
Continuing on with this theme I'm going to use an extremely bad analogy for performance improvement which I've taken from The Matrix:
Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon [ed: with your mind]. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.
The other is "Free your mind" which if you do means you can end up saying "Woah" a lot like Keanu Reeves did.
To me it means being prepared to throw out something that you have accepted as strong scientific "fact" for a long long time, because you've seen something new that could perhaps challenge that. And instead of dismissing it out of hand as you've done so often before because it doesn't agree with what you know, making you a poor scientist, you try it out. And you see results that make you think because they're interesting. And so you try it again, but differently, and the results are compelling enough to give you sleepless nights (in a good way). A rather large piece of the puzzle gets taken out and inserted in a different way making the whole picture clearer. And you realise you've been blinkered all along because you thought your understanding was so good. In fact the original science was good, it just wasn't complete and you misinterpreted it.
This principle can be applied to anything. I have applied it to riding a bike. It is, I think good, but I am not totally sure at this stage. Thus the beard will stay on for longer until normal service is resumed.
