A Buttered Cat Question
Have you ever wondered about the theory that a cat always lands on it's feet? If you have, you're not the only one.
This question was posed to the Usenet Oracle:
If you drop a buttered piece of bread, it will fall on the floor butter-side down. If a cat is dropped from a window or other high and towering place, it will land on it's feet.
But what if you attach a buttered piece of bread, butter side up to a cat's back and toss them both out the window? Will the cat land on it's feet? Or will the butter splat on the ground?
And in response, thus spoke the Oracle:
Even if you are too lazy to do the experiment yourself, you should be able to deduce the obvious result. Th laws of butterology demand that the butter must hit the ground, and the equally strict laws of feline aerodynamics demand that the cat cannot smash it's furry back. If the combined contruct were to land, nature would have no way to resolve the paradox.
Therefore it simply does not fall.
That's right you clever mortal (well, as clever as a mortal can get), you have discovered the secret of antigravity! A buttered cat will, when released, quickly move to a height where the forces of cat-twisting and butter repulsion are in equilibrium. This equillibrium point can be odified by scraping off some of the butter, providing lift, or removing some of the cats fur, allowing decent.
Most of the civilized species of the Universe already use this principle to drive their ships while within a planetary system. The loud humming heard by most sighters of UFO's is, in fact, the purring of several hundred tabbies. The one obvious danger is, of course, if the cats manage to eat the bread off their backs they will instantly plummet. Of course the cats will land on their feet, but this usually doesn't do them much good, since right after they make their graceful landing, several tons of red-hot starship and angry aliens crash on top of them.
Flaws in the Flying Cat Theory : A Response
Special to the Coastal Beacon by Geoffrey Baker
A logical analysis of the BFAD (Buttered Feline Antigravity Drive) propulsion theory clearly demonstrates the impossiblity of such a system.
Let us begin with a simple analysis
1) Buttered bread must fall butter side down
2) A cat always lands on it's feet
While both theorems are indisputable, the oracle offers no proof of the construct. The oracle implies that anyone who 'would' test this construct would immediately find the secret of BFAD.
This is clearly nonsense.
Let us assume a normal Einsteinian universe (although a Euclidean universe would serve our purposes just as well, the Einsteinian is both cheaper and drinks are readily available.)
To test BFAD, one must procure:
Bread
Butter (margarine for some reason, will not work)
A cat
A strapping device
Let us assume that all of these a readily available.
Attach the strapping device to the cat.
See?
No cat.
What has happened? We have run up against a priori universal law. By a priori, we mean that it takes priority over either the Buttered Bread Principle or the Law of Feline Landings. What happens is that the instant that a strapping device and a cat occupy the same four dimensional space, the cat disappears. Now, this can be easily tested, and has been repeatedly. There are two schools of thought on this phenomenon.
The first holds that a cat and a strapping device are contituted out of different fundamental building blocks. According to this theory, a cat is constituted primarily of superquarks, (called meows by most current theorists.) These superquarks demonstrate qualities that are both atomic (constituted as they are of groupings of normal quark particles) and feline (because these quarks exhibit characteristics of "charmed" or "lucky" particles.) Again according to this theory, strapping materials are fashioned our of non-charmed particles. Bringing the two together causes one or the other to cancel out. One aspect of this theory that has not been sufficiently explained to date is the fact that it is always the cat, not the strapping device, that disappears.
The second school of thought, and it is one that appears to be gaining gound in academic circles today, holds that cats are, in fact, super-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who exist in our four dimensional universe only because there is plenty of good food and a lot of creatures stupid enough to provide the food, along with plenty of attention. Whenever a strapping device appears, the cat simply opens a door to a different series of dimensions, and goes on an extemded tour.
Accroding to this theory, purring is a cat's way of maintaining a constant balance cycling across multiple dimensions. This school holds that antigravity is impossible, but that theoretically, a REALLY good grip on a cat, while reaching for a strapping device, could result in our ability to cross dimensions with ease, (barring scratches, that is.) Pessimists argue that if there was anything really interesting in those other dimension, cats wouldn't spend so much time here, so why ask for a good scratching???
Page taken from http://.www.wlw.com/roni/cat.html
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