Hairy Ball Theorem Updated
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”.
Scholarly Explanations Of "YES!"
The scholarly journal Parallax (vol. 16, no.3, 2010) is a special edition on the subject of ‘YES!’.
Gary Peters,
who is Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory at York St. John
University, UK, is guest-editor for the issue, and is also author of one
of the key papers 'Yes, No, Don't know'
Sopranos - Under MRI
The first scientific study to employ real-time magnetic resonance imaging (RT) MRI to obtain midsagittal vocal tract sequential image data from a total of 5 soprano singers was published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, November 2010 (Express Letters pp. EL335-EL341)
Boomerangs - The Aerodynamics
It has been said that a fully developed mathematical formula is one of the shortest possible ways to describe a physical phenomenon. Some phenomena, however, are so complex that their mathematical description can be dauntingly large. Take for example the formula to describe the aerial motion of a boomerang.
Shuttlecocks - The Aerodymamics (part 1)
For badminton players: “The centre piece of the game is no doubt a
shuttlecock which is made of either natural feathers or synthetic rubber
with an open conical shape.” But perhaps some are left wondering which
is best from an aerodynamic point of view – a feathered ‘bird’ or a rubber one?
“Although
a series of studies on aerodynamic behaviour of spherical and
ellipsoidal balls have been reported in the open literature, scant
information is available in the public domain about the aerodynamic
behaviour of badminton shuttlecocks.”
Biscuits - And The Creation Of Cranial Vibrations
Does one’s skull vibrate when chewing biscuits? The answer is yes,
up to a point – that’s according to a recentl experimental study performed
by the Department of Oral-Maxillofacial Surgery, Prosthodontics and
Special Dental Care Oral Physiology Group, at the University Medical
Center Utrecht, The Netherlands, along with the Department of Prosthetic
Dentistry, Faculty of Dentistry, Lutheran University of Brazil, Porto
Alegre, Brazil.
Creativity Via Ball Squeezing
Want to be more creative? No problem, just take a ball and squeeze it
(but only in your left hand, otherwise the consequences are as yet
unknown).Dr. Abraham Goldstein (pictured) along with colleagues at the Brain Research Center of Bar-Ilan
University, Israel, published their finding in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin&Review.
That Lingering Whiff Of Asparagus . . .
For Marcel Proust, one of the after-effects of eating asparagus, was that it “…transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume.’’
What Gives People 'The Chills' ?
“ ‘Chills’ (frisson manifested as goose bumps or shivers) have been used in an increasing number of studies as indicators of emotions in response to music …”But in a new research project, investigators from Hanover University of Music and Drama (hmtmh) in Germany focused their attention not just on chills which are exclusively musically-induced, but also on those initiated by aural, visual, tactile, and taste stimulation. A comprehensive set of experiments were devised to investigate.
What Does "Well" Mean?
What does “Well” mean? Or, more specifically, what does ‘Well’ mean when it’s used as the first word in response to so-called ‘Wh-questions’ (which, what, who, whom, whose, where, whence, whither, when, why, whynot, wherefore, whatever etc. etc.)? Professor Gene H. Lerner and Professor Emanuel A. Schegloff offer an explanation in the April 2009 issue of the journal Research on Language&Social Interaction.“We show that these well-prefaces operate as general alerts that indicate nonstraightforwardness in responding …”
In Search Of 'the Telepathy Center'
Some believe in the power of telepathy. Some believe in the power of fMRI. And putting the two together led a team of experimenters from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, and the Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana, Vivekananda Yoga Research Foundation, Bangalore, India to perform :“Probably the first fMRI study to analyse the neuroanatomical correlates of telepathy.”
Lottery Tickets - To Swap, Or Not To Swap?
If you had just bought a lottery ticket, would you be willing to swap it? If you’re like most people, the answer would be an emphatic ‘No’. But why? Given that a properly-run lottery is an entirely random affair, mathematical theory dictates that your chances of winning won’t change whether you swap or not.
Investigating The Implications Of Sugar Pigs
A recent edition of ‘M/C – A Journal of Media and Culture’ features one of the very few, perhaps the only, fully blind, peer-reviewed academic papers on sugar pigs. Author Toni Risson, at the University of Queensland, Australia, first defines sugar-pigginess. “Sugar pigs are traditional confections shaped like sugar mice with little legs and no tail.” And then goes on to refine the implications of sugar pig consumption – starting at the beginning :“As an imagined border between the private world inside the body and the public world outside, the mouth is an unstable limit of selfhood.”
