FW: Cats+Toast - an experiment.....

Stephen Webster <snefvqr@ZNVYOBK.HD.RQH.NH> recently posted a "Stephen
Wright quote" that asked "If toast always lands butter-side down, and cats
always land on their feet, what happens if you strap toast on the back of a
cat and drop it?"

 - Robert Bragner's answer:

After a great deal of experimentation, in which I used up two loaves of
Wonder Bread, a tub of Land 'O Lakes butter, and quite a few cats, I can
say that the results are inconclusive. 80% of the time, the cat landed on
its feet. I suspected however that this might be due to the disproportion
in the cat/buttered-toast masses. Increasing the number of slices of
buttered toast as well as decreasing the size of the cat seemed to bear
this supposition out.  The closer the relative weights of cat:buttered
toast approached 1:1, the more the initial drop configuration (ie cat up or
down) seemed to influence the landing. My conclusion was that buttered
toast didn't work.

My observations however inspired me to try strapping two cats back-to-back
and dropping them. I discovered that if you work from a sufficient height
(a second-story balcony seems to do nicely), 30% of the time (on average)
one of the cats landed on its feet; however in the other 70% of the trials,
the two cats landed on their sides. This confirmed my observations (of the
cat+buttered toast experiments) that the assemblage was capable of
*rotating under its own power as it fell*. In other words, angular momentum
was being generated and this suggested that, if it could be harnessed, it
might prove to be a source of (relatively) clean and cheap energy.

I tested this hypothesis a few times with FOUR cats strapped to a 4-by-4
beam dropped from a height of ten meters. Unfortunately the muscular energy
of just four cats proved to be insufficient to cause the mass of the beam
to rotate at all. An 8-cp (eight cat-power) assemblage with a four-cat
array strapped at either end of such a beam should, in theory, work; but
trials have revealed that, with this many cats involved, their individual
efforts to land feet-first are cancelled out because the cats don't all try
to right themselves in the same direction or at the same time. Although
some angular motion does occur, it is erratic at best.

I intend to continue this research by experimenting with lighter,
composite-material beams and also with better ways of timing and
coordinating cat-effort delivery and will be getting on with it just as
soon as the suspicions of the neighborhood's (former) cat-owners have been
allayed and a new supply of cats is available.