Beware of cats with buttered toast strapped to their backs

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Greetings.

Jewish date:  17 Nisan 5770.

Today’s quasi-holidays:  April Fool’s Day, International Dadaism Month.

Worthy causes of the day:  “Tell Congress to stand up to corporate influence”, “Stop the Hate Speech - The Petition Site”, and “Heart Disease and Stroke. You’re the Cure.”

Today’s news and commentary:

• “war games”
  
• “Awash in Awareness: Knowing a Product's "Water Footprint" May Help Consumers Conserve H₂O”
  
• “Ferocious hot chili pepper to make nasty weapons”:  I cannot make something like this up, and this is not an April Fool’s Day joke.
• “Addicted to Fat: Overeating May Alter the Brain as Much as Hard Drugs”
  
• “Solar at Home: Are old houses doomed? The conflict between historic preservation and energy efficiency”
• “An Absence of Class in the G.O.P.”

Today’s weird thing, which I found this morning when searching for something else, is the buttered cat paradox.  In this paradox, the question is asked what would happen if a piece of buttered toast were strapped to the back of a cat and the combination dropped.  Murphy’s Law demands that a dropped piece of toast must hit the floor butter-side down, but nevertheless a dropped cat is supposed to land on its feet.  A variety of possible answers can be found at “Science Jokes:2. PHYSICS : 2.21 THE BUTTERED BREAD ON CAT PROBLEM”.  Note that since this is Pesaḥ/Passover, experimentally testing what happens violates the prohibition on ḥameṣ (leavened bread).  This experiment also arguably violates the prohibition on wasting food.  Enjoy, share the weirdness, and think twice before trying this as a science project.

Aaron