Curious George

A fountain of material and immaterial information - Things that I spend my days wondering about... and perhaps you have been too? Check out www.figenschou.net for more curious questions (and answers to them)

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Invinvible cats

For those of us who like cats, we are of course mostly fascinated by their ability to scratch and kill at their will.
Yet their most impressive skill they keep secret from us (until we fling them out of an aeroplane)

Cats always land on their feet, and they survive pretty much no matter how far they fall (assuming they don´t die from asphyxiation - or in other words: Suffocate)

Discovery channel has a special on this, and it turns out that cats can fall as far as they want and still survive the fall (assuming they dont land on a rubble of cut glass, a pointy sword, a church spire or the likes...).
Once they get their bearings they use their body as a parachute. There have been registered incidents of cats falling 20 stories or more without coming to harm.

No way right?! Way!!

A 1987 Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association study, examined 132 cases of cats that had fallen out of high-rise buildings. Average fall was 5.5 stories, and 90% survived (though in truth many did suffer serious injuries).
But here comes the real rub. Turns out the broken bones and damages ratio went up and up once you got the 7th floor. After that, the injury rate actually declined sharply!!
So the higher the fall, the better the chances of walking away clean.

When you combine this with retractable claws.... come one! Who cant think cats are cool?!

My disclosure is as follows; I think cats are cool, so I might give them a bit more credit than they deserve. This study for example does not really go into detail about the potential of alot more cats dying and having gone straight into the dumpster. It doesnt quite discount the fact of higher survival rate above 7th floor, but it does leave the study open to discussion.

The confusing moon - ebb and tides

So we all know there is a high tide twice a day - and that it has something to do with the moon. I sometime pretend that this makes perfect sense even though the moon just rotates around the world ones a day. And am quite happy nobody has called me on explaining why this makes so much sense... because it really doesnt...

There will also come a follow-up blogg-article on the concept of not only the water moving, but also the earths crust moving around and being attracted by the moon. But firstly lets figure out the water movement.

The pull of gravity is reduced dramatically with distance. So lunar gravity pulls on the side of the earth thats facing it, aswell as pulling somewhat on the other side of the earth too (But very much less so). So the high-tide that occurs when the moon is closest to that side of the earth is one of the high-tides, where the high tide on the "other side" is a result of the moon´s tug on the earth, "leaving the ocean behind".

Saturday, August 30, 2008

What's in an hour....

For would it not by any other name be as long?
Turns out that an hour has not always been an hour...
The division of day into 24 hours dates back to Mesopotamia and Egypt. With basis in the moons 12 cycles in a year, the day and night was each given 12 hours. The only problem is of course that an hour was dramatically different in Mesopotania than in England or Norway. An hour was also very different in summer and in winter.
Today, we have defined an hour as 60minutes times 60 seconds, where 1 second is 9 192 631 770 oscillations of the Cesium atom 133Cs.