h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There was a thread somewhere that asked if you dropped a piece of butter bread and a cat at the same time, or was it if you tied a piece of buttered bread on the back of a cat and dropped it what side up would it all land??

Today I got to answer a part of that question. If you drop a cat and a piece of buttered bread at the same time, the cat will land on its feet and the bread will land, butter side down on the cat!

I really wish I could remember what thread it was on but i can't so Im posting it in a new one.
If anyone has a cat that uses bread as a hand glider and has crashed recently, let me know the outcome of the other scenario??

I will bid you all sweet dreams and farewell

Will

Now, the version I've heard of this is for the construction of an anti-gravity machine. It's well known that cats always land on their feet and bread always lands butter side down, so what you do is strap a piece of buttered bread to the back of a cat, butter side up, then drop the cat. Since the cat has to land on its feet and the bread has to land butter side down, what should happen is that when the cat reaches a few inches above the floor, it begins to gently revolve - a bit like Arthur Dent throwing himself at the ground and missing

As i recall, the antigravity device was improved by noticing that the likely hood of staining was affected by the staining ability of the falling object and the toughness to clean of the surface being impacted.

The toast was noticed to be superfluous and so the perfect antigravity machine was eventually found to be a cat with chicken tikka massalla smeared all over its back floating over a white, shag pile carpet.

likely hood ?
likelihood

So, the cat/buttered bread was the prototype then

Yea... but where did I read that...


I tried to remember the source for that several months ago. I vaguely thought it might have been Douglas Adams, but I'm not so sure now....


GRRR... It's on the tip of my brain's tongue.

Well, a quick google shows that it's a commonly forwarded science joke.

Several websites show this same text:

---------- Forwarded message ----------

> THE SECRET OF ANTIGRAVITY...
> ----------------------------------
>
> 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 its 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 its feet? Or will the butter
> splat on the ground?
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Even if you are too lazy to do the experiment
> yourself you should be able to deduce the obvious result.
> The laws of butterology demand that the butter must hit the
> ground, and the equally strict laws of feline aerodynamics
> demand that the cat can not smash its furry back. If the
> combined construct were to land, nature would have no way to
> resolve this 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 equilibrium point can be modified by
> scraping off some of the butter, providing lift, or removing
> some of the cat's limbs, allowing descent.
>
> 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 UFOs 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 pissed
> off aliens crash on top of them.
>
> And now a few words on solving the problem of creating a
> ship using the aforementioned anti-gravity device.
>
> One could power a ship by means of cats held in suspended
> animation (say, about -190 degrees Celsius) with buttered
> bread strapped to their backs, thus avoiding the possibility
> of collisions due to tempermental felines. More importantly,
> how do you steer, once the cats are all held in stasis?
>
> I offer a modest proposal:
>
> We all know that wearing a white shirt at an Italian
> restaurant is a guaranteed way to take a trip to the
> laudromat. Plaster the outside of your ship with white
> shirts. Place four nozzles symmetrically around the ship,
> which is, of course, saucer shaped. Fire tomato sauce out
> in proportion to the directions you want to go. The ship,
> drawn by the shirts, will automatically follow the sauce.
> If you use t-shirts, you won't go as fast as you would by
> using, say, expensive dress shirts. This does not work as
> well in deep gravity wells, since the tomato sauce (now
> falling down a black hole, perhaps) will drag the ship with
> it, despite the counter force of the anti-gravity cat/butter
> machine. Your only hope at that point is to jettison
> enormous quantities of Tide. This will create the
> well-known Gravitational Tidal Force.
>

------- End of Forwarded Message

Yes I got it by email many moons ago

it claimed to be the winner in some magazine's competition for wacky science theories. However, the truth of that may be lost in the mists of time...

I saw references to 1998 and to 1988 but nothing citing a source. After about 10 pages of google hits and most of those being very similar (either science based pages simply quoting the above or joke websites doing the same) I gave up.

It's too widely quoted with no citations or credit.

(Of course maybe page 11 might have had the original, but who knows.)


If anyone finds out I'd be thrill to know.

Handglider?

>> It's too widely quoted with no citations or credit. <<

That's the trouble with cyberspace and urban myths. No one is willing to take the blame for anything anymore. Oh well, shoot 'em all and let god sort it out.

~jwf~

Gee, thanks, ~jwf~ -- I posted that here about 4 years ago, but I don't remember the source, either....

SC

I first heard it when Steven Wright (brilliant dry witted American stand-up) told it many many years ago.

Another of his is:
"Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn't happen"

I love that one!

That might have been it... but it seems too... extended for Steven Wright....

to google.

Several joke sites and blogs cite Steven Wright, but again they are copied and pasted.

Still not sure.

When Steven Wright recently won an a religious joke award he mentioned that as one of his favourites of his own jokes.

Crivvens, terrible sentence structure.

Ah! Good.

Other's just ran with it.