Buttered Cat Paradox

[itaibn]

It's impossible to provide a formal mathematical proof for the claim, but I can provide many instances of intelligent objects outsmarting stupid objects.

At least provide a falsification of the claim.

[smw543]

Oh. I guess i (accidentally) said basically the same thing as you, but simpler. Sorry.

On a related note, I would like to announce my latest invention: the toast harness for cats. Of course it doesn't benefit the cat in any way, but it more than pays for itself in entertainment value.

Now I don't like you and I'm confused by you. I said I didn't like you because of your blatant disregard for the kind of (pseudo)science we stand for here at xkcd. The only thing you said that was the same as me was the part about the Toast Harness for Cats^TM, which you seem to have presented as your own invention.

On a related note, I am now suing you for patent infringement. You will be served as soon as the steam stops shooting from my ears .

@ilyaa: Very much agreed.

[idobox]

idobox wrote:Bush was elected twice.

I don't see how this goes against the theory.

Well, Bush isn't exactly famous for being the smartest candidate in history, but he nonetheless achieved the goal of being elected twice.
Then again, I'm French, so speaking ill of Bush is like some kind of genetic determinism.

[oxoiron]

Shit! I think I might be French.

[smw543]

Shit! I think I might be French.

By that logic, roughly 70% of the American population is French.

[thoughtfully]

Cats don't always land on their feet. They have quick reflexes that help with that, but its possible for them to land on they backs. Also if the cat lands on its feet the toast has not technically landed, therefore the toast is not landing butter side down.

[[Citation Needed]]

We don't need no steenking citations! He's contradicting one of the fundamental premises of the thread. He's free to have heretical misapprehensions, but he'll find a friendlier reception elsewhere.

[Actaeus]

Also, neither Einstein, Bohr, Pauli nor any famous scientist, mathematician or even philosopher ever won the national lottery, while a bunch of not very smart people did.

These people are intelligent enough to know there is no logical reason to enter.

Uh, no. Utility is a much better measure for economic payoff than money. A lottery ticket transaction benefits both parties, as does insurance.

Hey! There we go. If lotteries are irrational, so is insurance.

idobox wrote:Bush was elected twice.

I don't see how this goes against the theory.

Well, Bush isn't exactly famous for being the smartest candidate in history, but he nonetheless achieved the goal of being elected twice.
Then again, I'm French, so speaking ill of Bush is like some kind of genetic determinism.

Distrustful stare whilst munching Freedom Fries and listening to Rush Limbaugh...

I still wonder how Bush avoided impeachment.

[J Spade]

I still wonder how Bush avoided impeachment.

He never did anything wrong per se, just things a lot of people didn't agree with.

[mrbaggins]

Also, neither Einstein, Bohr, Pauli nor any famous scientist, mathematician or even philosopher ever won the national lottery, while a bunch of not very smart people did.

These people are intelligent enough to know there is no logical reason to enter.

Uh, no. Utility is a much better measure for economic payoff than money. A lottery ticket transaction benefits both parties, as does insurance.

Hey! There we go. If lotteries are irrational, so is insurance.

I'm going to go ahead and say, yes, both are irrational. With insurance, you are gambling that you are going to lose. It's like betting someone 3:1 on $10 that you are going to lose $100 before the day is out. If you win, you're out $70, if you lose the bet, you're out $10. Why would you?

Anywho, on utility... Is that trying to make the point that a lottery ticket benefits people because it's fun to play? In that case, sure, it has a payoff. Personally, I'd take my $5-$10 a week and go do something else. Almost anything is more fun than watching balls with numbers I didn't pick go through tubes on TV.

[mdyrud]

Cats don't always land on their feet. They have quick reflexes that help with that, but its possible for them to land on they backs. Also if the cat lands on its feet the toast has not technically landed, therefore the toast is not landing butter side down.

The way around this seeming paradox is to take a thick enough slice of buttered toast and strap it against the cat with the buttered side in contact with the stomach. The cats feet are unable to reach the ground, and the buttered side is blocked by the cats body. Q.E.D.

[smw543]

The way around this seeming paradox is to take a thick enough slice of buttered toast and strap it against the cat with the buttered side in contact with the stomach. The cats feet are unable to reach the ground, and the buttered side is blocked by the cats body. Q.E.D.

Such arrogance. And yet...fail. If the buttered side is facing in towards the cat's stomach, then it can't "land" (nor does it have any desire to) because it isn't in the air.

[mdyrud]

Curses, another shot at the Nobel down in flames. Oh well, when I get my other perpetual motion machine going it is mine for the taking.

[coblenski]

If we were to attach the toast buttered side down to the cat, upon landing, would the toast just crush the cat into a paste? I can't think of any ethical applications for this yet, though.

[radagast]

The tangent about intelligence is actually fundamental to the success of the project.

As Actaeus has postulated, and quintopia ascertained through testing,

I believe the general effect is one that disappoints the dropper; hence, the Mythbusters (hoping for an interesting result) got a 50-50 tally, whereas someone planning to eat the toast will inevitably drop it butter-side-down.

It is the intelligence of the cat that will activate the Buttered Toast force. You don't want to surround the Cat-Toast system with people sitting at breakfast tables hoping the toast won't land BSiD - imagine when we're about to launch the first operational C-T power plant, and the whole thing is cancelled because of the lefty protestors and their concerns about the thousands of children (one per piece of toast) we are keeping hungry to make sure the toast doesn't just fall any old way. My countryman (in real-world as well as fantasy-world geography) MrBaggins has unearthed an overlooked inference : the cat's latent desire for the toast to land BSiU is what keeps her landing on her back.

I propose some stoners try the experiment with fish paste on the toast. I think the system will spin much faster.

[KrO2]

We say the predicted events will "always" happen, but the Laws as usually stated only mean that both the cat-force and the toast-force are stronger than gravity. It is entirely possible that one force outweighs the other. To find whether this is the case, and which force is the stronger, we need to measure the universal constants relevant to the forces*. I suggest we call the constant relating to the cat-flipping force "mu," because pun. We can pick a letter for the other force as soon as we decide what sound toast makes. If the strengths of the forces can be found, we will be able either to find the exact amounts of butter and cat needed for a successful whatever happens next, or at least find out which side the C-T system lands on.

*Or at least the constants simplified for Earth gravity, air pressure, etc.

[Diadem]

Buttered toast will always hit the floor with the buttered side down, right? And a cat will always land on its feet. Those are the basic premises. However, nowhere it is said that cats will land [i]on the ground[i/]. Only for the butter this is a requirement.

So if you drop a CT system anywhere in a room, it will immidiately fall towards the corner, where the buttered toast will hit the ground and the cat's feet the wall at exactly the same time. Thus solving the paradox.

[grythyttan]

But what if the cat simply is very flexible? Would it then be possible for the cat to land like this:

preventing the paradox.

[Boreeas]

But what if the cat simply is very flexible? Would it then be possible for the cat to land like this:

preventing the paradox.

You have a big slice of toast there...

Well, in an infinite number of universes, there must be one universe where the cat warps back to its original position due to quantum teleportation, and repeating the circle for ever. The continued acceleration would rip apart the borders between the universes, causing them to form a fusionated uber-universe with a spinning cat in the middle.

[davidstarlingm]

Have dolphins outsmarted gravity yet?

Dolphins have always outsmarted gravity. That's what comes of living in the water....you get to choose between flying and floating 100% of the time.

They had us beat by....by....whenever dolphins first learned to swim (in years BC) plus 1903. Years.

[justaman]

Forget the buttered toast - how about two cats strapped back to back? Though that could be seen as the ultimate killing machine

[Odd_nonposter]

What if we were to suspend a CT system between two masses at the point where their gravitational pulls canceled such that neither butter nor cat faced either mass?

[RobotMenace]

What if we were to suspend a CT system between two masses at the point where their gravitational pulls canceled such that neither butter nor cat faced either mass?

I don't think there would be a down in that situation.*

But seriously people, can't we just put this to the test? I have toast, a cat, and a stapler. It can't be much more dangerous than the LHC.

*EDIT: So the CT effect wouldn't come into play.

[Dark Avorian]

I think we're all missing the rather important point made earlier. Cats always land on their feet. Toast is evil and is out to crush our hopes and dreams. As such it usually lands with butter down, but when rigorously tested acts like a coin. Obviously the power of a CT device could transform human civilization, and a cat landing on it's back would amuse us and produce gales of laughter, so the toast will allow the Cat force to do it's work undiminished. (If it's a beloved cat the toast may also inflict tremendous downward force and crack its spine)

[pizzazz]

Unfortunately, the paradox as normally worded doesn't work. The cat's back can be treated as a counter, so there is no reason the toast should pull to the ground as the cat lands on its feet. This is remedied by putting toast, butter side on, on the bottom of the cat's feet. Then as the C-BT system approaches the ground, the toast tries to rotate one way, while the cat rotates the other.

[Talith]

...nor any famous scientist, mathematician or even philosopher ever won the national lottery

[citation needed]

Googlewhack? In any case it's pretty good evidence for the affirmative case.

[canoemoose]

You're all missing a very important point - you'll never be able to harness any energy produced by the CT system, as if you couple the system to anything in order to extract its kinetic energy, the system will then become supported above the ground and will fail to rotate, as it is no longer falling.

I imagine the only way to extract energy is to enclose the cat-toast system in a control volume, and rely on thermodynamic effects and the hearing of the air in the control volume.

[Meteorswarm]

You're all missing a very important point - you'll never be able to harness any energy produced by the CT system, as if you couple the system to anything in order to extract its kinetic energy, the system will then become supported above the ground and will fail to rotate, as it is no longer falling.

I imagine the only way to extract energy is to enclose the cat-toast system in a control volume, and rely on thermodynamic effects and the hearing of the air in the control volume.

There are lots of ways to make this work. If you know how they're rotating once they stabilize, you could enclose them in a shroud and put fins on them to turn them into an air pump, which you could then harness. You could attach magnets to them and use the changing magnetic field produced by their rotation to generate electricity. None of these things give them support, so they would remain falling.

[Antimony-120]

You're all missing a very important point - you'll never be able to harness any energy produced by the CT system, as if you couple the system to anything in order to extract its kinetic energy, the system will then become supported above the ground and will fail to rotate, as it is no longer falling.

I imagine the only way to extract energy is to enclose the cat-toast system in a control volume, and rely on thermodynamic effects and the hearing of the air in the control volume.

There are lots of ways to make this work. If you know how they're rotating once they stabilize, you could enclose them in a shroud and put fins on them to turn them into an air pump, which you could then harness. You could attach magnets to them and use the changing magnetic field produced by their rotation to generate electricity. None of these things give them support, so they would remain falling.

Actually technically both those things do offer some support, though in different manners. In particular the magnet one is actually introducing an upowards force driven by the spinning. This begs the question, what is the minimum acceleration needed to invoke the attributes in both cat and toast? We know that if you put a cat down lightly on it's back, this is doable. But if you were to try throwing it down rapidly you would note a strong "squirming" caused by the inherent torque. By contract though, a piece of toast will not invoke such a reaction no matter how hard you slam it down.

This suggests that a different mechanism is involved regarding cat-torque versus toast-torque. I suggest units for these be "one splat", equivalent to the torque of one piece of toast, and one "cock-block" for the difficulty of getting a pussy on it's back. I also suggest I be shot for the previous pun*.

*It's really just a pun, if it was a rooster I'd have made a cock joke, please don't be offended. In fact, I think we should introduce roosters just for the innuendos we can create

[Meteorswarm]

If you call any force at all "support," then we have a problem, but I think that the difference between actually attaching an axle to the cat and interacting via more indirect methods is sufficient to avoid disturbing the CT disequilibrium.

[RebeccaRGB]

Avatar I created years ago:

[Technical Ben]

With the tone of the latest Star Trek film, I was expecting one of these to be installed in the ship.