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.
FOR SCIENCE!
A while back I found the Big Brown Envelope with my Big School reports in it, all the way from Form I (aged 11) to Form Upper VI-B (aged 18) and @dduane was highly amused at how specific my separation of grades were: in summary, Arts were excellent, Sciences were abysmal.
This is partly because (1) I liked one but not the other and (2) I had good (able to make it interesting) teachers in one but not the other.
However dropping cats to determine geography-related feline gravitation-influenced ballistic rotation might have improved my science marks by a considerable margin.
Or I might just have brought the experimental subjects home with me, bc Cats.
