The Hairy Ball Theorem  (HBT) was first postulated (and then proved) by Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer in 1912. An informal statement of the theorem is that :

              “One cannot comb the hair on a coconut”.

It finally happened. One of the purple striped socks my daughter Lana had given me as a birthday present in Winnipeg a few years ago vanished at some stage while I was doing laundry in Los Angeles, after we gave a lecture at UCLA.

“Other related forms of curving noise include ‘graunching’ at switches and crossings (possibly due to flange rubbing), [and] ‘juddering’ thought to be caused by unstable dynamic behaviour of the vehicle…”

The question : ‘Why do some*(see note below) birds bob their heads when walking?’ has perplexed scientists for many years. Some researchers suggest that head-bobbing may be correlated with the morphology of the retina, but others propose that it’s mechanically linked to the locomotor system, and that its visual functions are secondarily adapted.

Please observe the following unusual locomotive behavior which begins at around 55 seconds into this video – when Groucho Marx starts to run.

Groucho is displaying a behaviour which scientists now call ‘Groucho Running’ *see note.

Amazing as it may seem, algorithmic methods for generating music go back at least as far as 1757 (see: Musikalisches Würfelspiel). But algorithmic methods for generating US ‘Country Music’ are far more recent.
Indeed, Jim Suruda and professor Norman Carver of the Department of Computer Science, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale IL, USA, are still in the process of refining the development of an Artificial-Intelligence-based software application called the ‘Automated Country Music Engine’ (ACME).

The software not only  :

To begin, an example of failed humor.  Two friends in their 20s (called ‘L’ who is female, and ‘R’ who is male) are conversing :

L: “What did the big cup say to the little cup?”
R: (sarcastically) “I’m bigger than you?”
L: “No, Nothing. Cups can’t talk”.

R: (completely ignoring L) “I can hold more water than you?”

When it comes to the names of lipsticks, anyone who has attempted to combine the ‘Presentation of Self’ theories of Erving Goffman and the semiotic modelling methods of Roland Gérard Barthes could well consult the work of professor Debra Merskin (of the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon, US), who has categorised the names of no less than 1,722 lipsticks.

“The names of lipsticks and how they penetrate women’s psyches as semiotic tools used in branding are the foci of the present study.”

The professor’s study delineated 14 name-categories for the lipsticks, and then allocated the names accordingly – the results are listed here in order of their popularity.