i am so delighted by cats, i love that we have little bendy animals that climb all over everything and break shit and dart around our homes at top speed and we’re totally cool with it like “ah yes, there it goes again”
The door is open a full six inches, cat. You do NOT need to sit next to it and yell mournfully. You are not trapped.
Mun: Yours do that too, huh?
He finally realized that it was open.
I think the poor dummy actually doesn’t realize the door is open unless he walks up from an angle where he can see the gap. Our other cat pulls/pushes doors open with her paws and tries to get a grip on doorknobs, you’d think this one would learn eventually that doors are moveable. He’s not the smartest. I love him anyway, though.
This is the 10th one of these flowers Slash has stolen and brought home.
Here is number 11…
Here’s his third catch of the night.
And that second photo is his face right after I told him “People on the internet love your flower catching skills, Mr. Slash!”
Guess what Mr. Slash is up to tonight?
And, he’s back at it again tonight.
He got another one, and he is proud of himself.
He brought in another one tonight.
Thank you, Mr. Slash!
He is so beautiful 😭
He’s aware of that, and loves being told that. 😛
Sometimes, he will hold my hand when I ask him about the flowers.
He brought these two flowers in last night, and decided to pose for me when I put them near him to take photos.
Plot twist! He brought back a hibiscus tonight instead of the usual ones.
He must be feeling more tropical.
He’s back to the normal ones now…
Even when it’s raining, he still decides to go and find these. Good thing for him that whatever breed of cat he is, he has remarkably water-resistant fur!
He had a very busy night while everyone was asleep last night…
He had a busy night while I was watching SummerSlam.
He gave us one more last night, bringing his total from last night to 6! That’s a new one-night record for him!
Mr. Slash’s flower hunting adventure master post keeps on growing.
He was back at it again today.
And two more from last night…
Thank you, Mr. Slash!
Such a good kitty!
He is!
I wish Oreo brought me flowers instead of birds, lizards, mice, and squirrels 😂😂
Mr. Slash even wanted to hold hands after giving me this one.
He’s a special cat. 😀
He was asleep this morning after bringing me this one last night…
Two more gifts from Mr. Slash tonight.
Please tell Mr. Slash I love him.
Feeling sad? Have a big fluffy kitty bringing flowers to his people.
down the block is a person who is inexplicably losing all the flowers in her garden
@thoughts-of-an-x-factor did you ever find out where Mr. Slash got the flowers from? I’m so curious now!!
Oh! I’ve explained it before, but I know some people haven’t seen the explanation, so here it is:
Mr. Slash has made friends with an elderly woman who lives about three houses down from me. He gets the flowers from her garden. They are Camellias, so they grow, and fall off the bush by the handful, and he goes over there at night, and takes every single one from the ground, to bring back to me.
So, when I said he was stealing them, it was somewhat inaccurate. It’s actually more like he’s helping an old woman clean her garden up, and giving me gifts at the same time. She knows who he is, and where he comes from, and knows what he does.
This is delightful, and what a beautiful cat he is!
Before we begin, I’ll have to state my heartfelt belief that there isn’t such a thing as useless research. Sating our human curiosity is a perfectly good reason for conducting experiments and doing science; wanting to know more is part of what makes us human, afterall. Your research does not need to be immediately useful to be valuable.
But goddamn if some of that research isn’t just straight up funny as fuck.
Michael J. Donahoo of Baylor University, Gary N. Boone of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Tucker Balch of the Carnegie Mellon University. This is one of those papers which scratches an itch of curiosity you wouldn’t even know you had until reading it, but the fact that this is published as a professionally-worded scientific paper pushes it from “mildly interesting” to “crying laughing” levels of hilarity.
So, without further ado, let’s open this baby and dig in.
The title of this marvelous publication is already a gift in and of itself. Behold:
Oh boy.
Basically what is happening here is that they’re testing if the Coriolis effect produced by the Earth’s rotation has an effect on the midair rotation of cats. Even more briefly, the subject of this research is to see if cats rotate in different directions when dropped on different hemispheres of Earth.
Fuck yeah, science.
The authors, apparently, didn’t share my belief that no research is useless, because they felt the need to actually give a reason as to why this knowledge is immediately practical to the human race, beyond providing insight into feline physiology. Namely:
Imagine being lost in some remote part of the world, and having no idea even which hemisphere you’re on. The solution? Why, catch a cat and fucking drop it, of course! Though chasing after a cat to drop in the middle of bumfuck nowhere is probably an excellent way to get even more lost, but I digress. This is the peak of human comedy, guys. Everybody go home. We had a good run but nothing and nobody is ever going to top this.
So, now that we’re done with the first paragraph, let’s get to the actual meat of the article. Starting with the wonderful diagrams such as this one:
Looking at that silhouette I cannot shake the feeling that that’s Sylvester the Cat.
And of course, the organically home-grown Scientist Snark™:
Translation: “You’re dumber than a cat, Frank.”
“We don’t fucking throw the cats, but only because it would distort the experimental data. Yeah, that’s good. Write that down Frank.”
You know, “it would be horribly cruel and unethical” is a pretty good justification for not launching cats out of a goddamn cannon. You made the right choice here, guys.
And finally, after arduous experimenting, we get the fruit of the authors’ labors, namely this results table:
Behold: science.
I have a hunch that the high amount of disqualifications probably results from the pissed off test subjects clawing the shit out of our intrepid researchers. I know Iwould be angry as hell if some big lug in a labcoat picked me up, held me upside down and dropped me many times. I’d give that guy what for, that’s for sure.
And now, for the results!
Translation:
“MOTHER FUCKER IT CLAWED ME SO BAD”
“Well maybe you shouldn’t have turned it upside down, Frank. Cats don’t like that very much.”
I CALLED IT. In this case, “disqualification” is most likely science terminology for “fucking with cats is a bad idea”.
Translation: “None of our friends on the southern hemisphere believed we were serious when we told them they’d have to turn cats upside down and drop them like the beat.”
Explaining this to your colleagues must have been a wild ride. I wish I was there to see that.
Well out of the thirty experiments you had done, 27 were invalid, and none were conducted on the southern hemisphere, but sure, let’s go with that.
And finally, for the conclusions derived from this groundbreaking experiment:
Yay…?
That is NOT a sentence I ever expected to read in a scientific paper.
Okay, okay. Up to this point I was reading this paper in complete uncertainty whether you guys were just taking the piss, but now you left no doubts. Just how fucking bored were you?!
MOVE OVER SELF-DRIVING CARS, SELF-DRIVING CATS IS WHERE IT’S AT
THE FUTURE IS NOW FUCKERS
FFFFFFfhhhucking hell, people. Reading this paper was… an experience. I’ll make sure to travel to Stockholm next year when these serious and professional gentlemen inevitably win the Nobel Prize in Medicine. I can’t wait to hear their acceptance speech, I’m sure it will be enlightening.
Moral of the story: don’t believe stupid movies that portray scientists as emotionless human robots scribbling away on their clipboards. They are equally bored as you, with the difference that they have the proper methodology to make their shitposting objectively correct. I mean, tell me this isn’t the most perfect meme format you have ever laid eyes upon.
You could tell me that, but I know you’d be lying.
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