Normally a headline like "The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same" would elicit much rolling of eyes here at Vulture Towers. However, it becomes more intriguing when one learns that the hypothesis described in the article was tested by a series of hilarious post-publication events that then further bolstered the paper's findings. At the end of February, MIT Technology Review emitted a pithy rundown of a 34-page research paper from maths-modelling boffins at Brandeis University in the US; the paper essentially posited that in a bid to make that all-important "countercultural statement", hipsters can end up looking alike. For groovy models of how random acts by hipsters "undergo a phase transition into a synchronized state" – along with some knotty network equations.
