DEP CHARGE

Back in the Dark Ages of semiconductor manufacture (1960s) when integrated device components were large enough for naked eye visualization, Gordon Moore proclaimed the number of gates on a chip would double every 18 months, hence Moore's Law. (Moore's maiden edict was "12 months" - overly optimistic.) Chip architecture scaled down past light microscopy to the edges of electron microscopy. Chip size expanded to rival sticks of gum, scribed from 18-inch and 24-inch diameter silicon wafers sawn from solid cylindrical silicon single crystals twelve feet long. Forty years of Moore's Law brought forth this essay via custom-hacked WordStar 6 huddled within 2 gigabytes of low-latency DDR ECC registered RAM in an AMD Athlon FX-55/WinXP.

(For fools suffering Wincrap Vista, WordStar would still be happy in the 640K of RAM remaining undestroyed by your operating system.)

Anxiously huddled on grocery and drug store shelves near you, Dep hairstyling goo has undergone a kindred lifestyle-shattering time-dependent metamorphosis. Hardly six months have passed since I reported on the tempest raging in pastel-colored water-based hair glue shipped with entrapped air bubbles to fill its container without excessively emptying corporate raw material inventories. Dep is now better, flashier, more fantastic, more extreme, more utterly wonderful (so says the label) than it ever before was - with exponents on every container's logo! - even though the contents have not changed a whit.

Color     Old Hype    New Hype      New Mission   New Level
------------------------------------------------------------
White      ------     Natural       Shine          Level 4
Yellow  Extra Super   Extra Super   Super Shaping  Level 5
Green   Super         Extra         Moisturizing   Level 6
Pink    Frizz-Taming  Flexible      Volumizing     Level 7
Orange  Ultimate      Ultimate      Texturizing    Level 8

Each Dep dispenser displays on its back label the full range of Dep delivery systems, starting at Level 4 and ending at Level 8, with a helpful graphic highlight of what is promised within in case you are too stupid to be propagandized by front label prose. The goo itself is still standard operating procedure: water; with thickening additions of poly(vinyl pyrrolidinone) (PVP, hemodynamic plasma extender and non-toxic water-soluble glue) plus sorbitol (humectant and non-caloric sweetener). White "Natural" Dep contains poly(vinyl pyrrolidinone-co-vinyl alcohol) random copolymer rather than straight PVP.

White Dep is an enigma. PVP is no one's idea of "natural," though it is endlessly biocompatible with life as we know it re humoral and cellular immune responses when poked into living tissue. Surface-graft PVP onto a hot dog, implant it, and the recipient flesh will not care. Try that with an untreated weenie and the FDA plus medical malpractice attorneys will be all over you. The critical conundrum lies between "natural" and vinyl alcohol, because vinyl alcohol does not exist.

Really. Were you to synthesize vinyl alcohol (no big deal) it would immediately keto-enol tautomerize into acetaldehyde. Vinyl alcohol is handled as its stabilized derivatives (such as vinyl acetate), polymerized, and the protecting group hydrolyzed off to reveal the "vinyl alcohol" polymer product. Dep as a generic concept is as unnatural as the Piltdown man (Eoanthropus dawsoni, hoax assembled by Charles Dawson from the jaw of a modern orangutan and a 600-year-old human skull in 1912 Kent, England). White Dep for all its chemical processing is doubly so.

(Warning! Dep consumers exercising a precipitant and unmollified endeavor to drag a comb through dried Dep-impregnated hair may rip their scalps right off their skulls. Patience is advised.)

Dep is a passingly adequate glue for primary school paper-based products, being something of a cousin once removed from Elmer's Glue-All (poly(vinyl alcohol-co-vinyl acetate) latex aqueous emulsion) and clear viscid liquid glues (aqueous PVP). Dep's sorbitol lends a much nicer flavor than that of library paste. It spares kids the excess empty calories of the latter, and avoids dental caries library paste potentially foments if ingested (floss and brush after gluing, children). Dep is contained within a decorous dispenser container which can thereafter be recycled to Save the Earth! and Save Our Children!

More's Law exercised for another decade or so will hit the wall of small scale quantum fluctuations. Nobody knows how to deal with wires only a few atoms wide, nor does insulation a few atoms thick amount to anything useful re AC circuits and impedance, let alone mere ohmic resistance. Dep is similarly positioned at the end of its rope, multipurpose intricacies of plebeian chemistry having been wrung dry. We anxiously anticipate Recombinant DNA Dep thumbing through a proffered Vogue magazine and taking a hand in its own gelatinous evolution thereafter. What pale pastel color do think it will be?