WikiWorld comic: "Buttered cat paradox"
WikiWorld is a weekly comic, carried by the Signpost, that highlights a few of the fascinating but little-known articles in the vast Wikipedia archives. The text for each comic is excerpted from one or more existing Wikipedia articles. WikiWorld offers visual interpretations on a wide range of topics: offbeat cultural references and personality profiles, obscure moments in history and unlikely slices of everyday life - as well as "mainstream" subjects with humorous potential. The comic can now be found on cartoon site Humorous Maximus.
Cartoonist Greg Williams developed the WikiWorld project in cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation, and is releasing the comics under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
Discuss this story
I think it was in the Feedback section of New Scientist that I first saw this phenomenon discussed. I recall them posting someone's correspondance the following week, where he described this action of a spinning cat as purrpetual motion StephenBuxton 09:28, 30 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
There's no purradox if the cat lands on its feet. In that case, the toast doesn't "land" at all, but simply remains unaltered strapped to the cat's back. Rwxrwxrwx 22:54, 30 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I think the crux of the dilemma is that the cat is exercising free will and choosing to land on its feet while the toast is simply following a law of attraction akin to gravity or the weak nuclear force.... however, just as gravity acts to fell a ball to the ground, but you can choose to override gravity and hold the ball in the air, so can the cat choose to override the butter-ground attraction (unless it is a very small cat and a very large piece of toast).... //// Pacific PanDeist * 02:06, 1 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]