Picture (by Sara Krulwich) spotted in a New York Times article about (apparently happily) performing cats in the Moscow Cats Theatre. Yep, it was in the Theatre section of the paper and all; they’re coming to perform in New York.
I was pleased to read the quote:
Cats are like actors,” Mr. Kuklachev [pictured below] said. “They do what they want. Sometimes a cat doesn’t want one trick, so he does another.
So… good, you still can’t herd cats, but:
As a cat-lover, the caption “Help Meeeeee!” is all I think when I see that picture and the expression on the cat’s face (you’ve got to say it out loud in the squeaky voice from the original movie called “The Fly“), but from reading the article, it sounds like they are wonderfully loved and looked after, and are quite happy. There are other pictures on the Times’ website, some involving bike riding, that disco ball lying there in the background, a rocking horse, and other household items…
-cvj
September 17th, 2005 at 3:05 pm
How great would it be if those cats could be specifically trained to demonstrate some principles of Physics. (As a fellow cat-lover I’m NOT NOT NOT thinking of a certain experiment involving a box and a vial of poison).
Two suggestions:
a) Conservation of angular momentum: Slow motion movie of cat changing its radius of gyration while falling from a height.
b) Conservation of linear momentum: Two cats on velcro’d skateboards approach one another at specific velocities, the boards get stuck and the combined cat system moves off at a different velocity.
September 17th, 2005 at 3:19 pm
Hmmmm, or for upper division physics and mathematics classes, you can employ, -as you suggest, citrine- their remarkable ability to invert themselves to right way up when dropped (while still conserving angular momentum) to teach about principal fibre bundles and gauge theory. (I’ve been blogging enough today so I won’t write an explanation, and hope that others might have a stab at giving some weblinks for those who are curious about this remark…)
-cvj
September 17th, 2005 at 3:23 pm
Ok, here’s a starting point: Richard Montgomery’s website.
-cvj
September 17th, 2005 at 5:35 pm
A caption contest…?
You don’t want to know where he’s going to stick that finger.
September 17th, 2005 at 5:39 pm
Matt… that’s mean!
Gosh, I did not intend it to be a another caption contest, but, hey….why not?
-cvj
September 17th, 2005 at 5:52 pm
“That’s how I train my grad students to perform on command.”
September 17th, 2005 at 6:06 pm
In a travelling series of popular public demonstrations, Professor E.U. Clid and his feline collaborator illuminated the properties of parallel lines in plane geometry.
-cvj
September 17th, 2005 at 6:09 pm
“Ok, Felix. Now it’s your turn to put on a silly costume!”
-cvj
September 17th, 2005 at 6:13 pm
Tense moments in the 2005 pet Olympiad: “Now Nadia, remember that all you have to do is stick the landing and we snatch the gold medal from the Americans!”
-cvj
September 17th, 2005 at 6:19 pm
Unusual things you can create from the vacuum with a strong enough magnetic field produced by two parallel current-carrying wires….
-cvj
September 17th, 2005 at 6:25 pm
Cat fashion-thoughts: “Am I the only one who thinks that wearing bagels on a jacket will never catch on?”
-cvj
September 17th, 2005 at 6:30 pm
This is what I do when I run out of grant money. (Attributed to either the cat or the trainer.)
September 17th, 2005 at 7:57 pm
Now we do the CAT scan.
September 17th, 2005 at 8:07 pm
These parallel lines exist in an Euclidean plane. The cat’s geometry is Reimannian.
September 19th, 2005 at 3:59 am
All of this for a rancid bowl of food, a fools game!
September 19th, 2005 at 9:01 am
Nothing mystical here.
Sometimes I get all these jumbled images(neurons firing) and although they seem inconsistant, the waiter turning the platter in a complete revoluton, or a cat turning it’s head to the ground to land on it’s feet, one might gather indeed to complete it all, you would need a 720 degree rotation?
Then I saw this superconductor and the cube floating.
The shape of the square, versus a spherical shape, that the latter should know no edge or place to rest, and like a pen that balances on it’s tip, what recipical valuation might have been gathered from Penrose plate to follow?
That entanglement would have been of some issue? Or that such methods with Gravity Probe B might be of some reward?
In a simple physics lesson of judo, the instructor pointed out, that if you turn your head to the ground “like a cat”, your body will follow. This helps you to land properly and dissipate the force with which you are slamming the ground. It does not hurt as much anymore:) This was only “half” the battle?:)