Designing a flyswatter is an interesting exercise in 
optimization.
You want it have enough holes so that it can quickly achieve swatting speed, but you don’t want it to have so many holes as to substantially decrease the chance of actually making contact with the pest.
I wonder if there is an industry standard for a flyswatter’s empty-space-to-surface-area ratio.
Paul the octopus must be enjoying his 15 minutes of fame for correctly predicting the outcomes of eight World Cup matches in a row. In fact, a stamp in his honor is currently available at the Shanghai World Expo. This must be a welcome relief from the death threats that followed his [ultimately accurate] prediction of Spain over Germany.
Assuming that the outcome of every match was equally likely (what if you don’t?), then Paul had a 1/256 chance ( that is, (1/2)^8 ) of nailing all eight predictions. That’s roughly a .4% chance, on the order of getting dealt a straight in a five-card poker hand, or rolling a six three times in a row on a fair die. Or, if you prefer, exactly equal to the likelihood of flipping a coin and getting Tails (Arms?) eight times in a row.
Apparently octopi have short lifespans, so it doesn’t look like Paul will be around in 2014 to put his record on the line. At least he’ll go out on top.
Before the World Cup disappears forever (to me, four years = forever) , I must point out that the vuvuzela
reminds me a lot of the surface of revolution known as the Horn of Gabriel,
which is obtained by rotating the function 
Thus, if this object existed in the real world, you could fill it up with a finite amount of paint, but you couldn’t cover the surface with a finite amount of paint. If that means anything.
My Mom recently explained to me how to tell if an aloe plant needs to be watered: if there isn’t enough water in the surrounding soil, the roots will draw water down from the stalks. As water is drawn down, the stalks will start to sag, kind of like a hot-dog balloon losing air.
This got me thinking that there may be a formula that relates the angle an aloe stalk makes with the normal to the ground and its percent water capacity–perhaps involving cosine? The basic idea is that as percent water capacity decreases, the angle with the normal increases.
A flow-chart overview of how Google search works, with some interesting details: