On cosmetology and cosmology

Via See the Invisible Hand, the Wall Street Journal reports on the escalating licensure requirements for many jobs:

Texas, for instance, requires hair-salon “shampoo specialists” to take 150 hours of classes, 100 of them on the “theory and practice” of shampooing.

By way of comparison: I have a bachelor’s degree in physics and a Ph.D. in astrophysics. Shampoo specialists spend more lecture hours learning “the theory and practice of shampooing” than I did on thermodynamics and solid state physics, combined.