Saturday, November 13, 2010

Dogs and cats drink differently; Spiro T. Agnew was a fool.

These thoughts are mine. They may be shared by many but I am speaking for myself. If you are offended, it was not intentional. If you continually get offended by my positions and opinions, you should change, I doubt I will.
NOVEMBER 13, 2010

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Nice to see the Carnival Spamalot was able to dock in San Diego. I bet the lawyers are busy in San Diego. This is going to cost Carnival quite a bit of money, meaning everybody who takes a cruise for the next several years will be paying for this fiasco.

So we now know why cats drink without making a mess while dogs just slop their water all around. With the help of super slow motion video, researchers discovered why.  According to a study reported in Friday’s journal Science.
Cats are better physicists than dogs, according to the new study - at least when it comes to drinking.
A cat lapping milk strikes a delicate balance between gravity and inertia, the research finds. Unlike dogs, which use their tongues to scoop water into their mouths, a cat uses the tip of its tongue to pull water upward, closing its jaws before gravity pulls the column of liquid back toward earth.
The method requires cats to lap at just the right speed to balance the inertial force that keeps the water moving upward with the gravitational force pulling the water back down.
"Perhaps the most intriguing part of what we found was that the cats seemed to know just exactly how rapidly or how fast they should lap," study researcher Roman Stocker, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told LiveScience. "By lapping at the right time, [cats] take optimal advantage of this balance between inertia and gravity."
Stocker and his colleagues report their results online today (Nov. 11) in the journal Science.
Balancing act.

The study started one morning with Stocker's cat, Cutta Cutta, a rescue from a Boston animal shelter. Stocker was eating breakfast and watching the cat drink when he suddenly wondered, "How does he do that?"
"It occurred to me that there were some interesting biophysics behind that process," Stocker said.
So he borrowed a high-speed video camera from his lab and taped Cutta Cutta drinking. With several other curious researchers along for the ride, Stocker analyzed those videos, along with video collected from Zoo New England and YouTube.com videos of lions, tigers and other big cats drinking.
"It seems to be that this is the first study in Science that uses YouTube as part of the research," Stocker said.
The first thing the researchers noticed is that cats and dogs drink very differently. Both animals extend their tongues and curl them back toward their chins as they approach water. But dogs use their bent tongues as a ladle, spooning water into their mouths. The scoop of sorts created by the cats' tongues stayed empty. Instead, cats touched only the top surface of their tongue to the water.
Once a cats' tongue touches the surface, it draws it back at a rate of almost four laps per second. The inertia of the movement draws the water upward (think "objects in motion tend to stay in motion"). At the same time, gravity fights to pull the water back down. As these forces lengthen and stretch the water column, the cat snaps its jaws shut at just the right moment, catching a mouthful of liquid before it falls.
I do not actually care for cats; I am a dog person this, however, is good to know. I am sure some taxpayer money helped fund the study but we waste money on much less important matters and this study actually has meaning to citizens other than those doing the study or teaching about the study.

Notable births on this date:

354 St Augustine of Hippo Numidia, Algeria, convert/Christian philosopher
1312 Edward III king of England (1327-77)
1838 Joseph F Smith 6th President of Mormon church
1850 Robert Louis Stevenson Scotland, author (Treasure Island)
1856 Louis D Brandeis Massachusetts, Supreme Court Justice (1916-39
1916 Jack Elam Miami AZ, actor (The Dakotas, East Street, Rio Lobo) How could he do that with his one eye.
1941 Dack Rambo Delano CA, actor (Guns of Will Sonnett, Dallas) with Walter Brennan as Will Sonnett
1941 Mel Stottlemyre Wash, pitcher (NY Yankee)/pitching coach (NY Met)

Notable deaths on this date:

867 St Nicholas I (the Great) pope (858-67), dies
1460 Henry the Navigator prince of Portugal, dies at 66
1829 Sam Patch loses his life in a 125' dive into Genesse Falls. Apparently did not die from intelligence.
1868 Gioacchino (Antonio) Rossini composer (Barber of Seville), dies at 76
1961 Wally Brown actor (Jed Fame-Cimarron City), dies at 57
1974 Karen Silkwood killed in a car crash under suspicious circumstances
1983 "Alvin" Junior Samples country singer (Hee Haw), dies at 56. The great ones die young.
1984 Dorothy Arnold actress, dies at 66

Notable events on this date:
867 St Nicholas I ends his reign as Catholic Pope
1002 English king Ethelred II launches massacre of Danish settlers
1775 American Revolutionary forces capture Montreal
1789 Ben Franklin writes "Nothing . . . certain but death & taxes"
1830 Oliver Wendell Holmes publishes "Old Ironsides"
1839 1st US anti-slavery party, Liberty Party, convenes in NY
1843 Mt Rainier in Washington State erupts
1849 Peter Burnett elected 1st governor of California
1854 "New Era" sinks off NJ coast with loss of 300
1865 PT Barnum's New American museum opens in Bridgeport
1865 US issues 1st gold certificates
1868 American Philological Association organized in NY
1875 Harvard-Yale game is 1st college football contest with uniforms
1875 National Bowling Association organized in NYC
1895 1st shipment of canned pineapple from Hawaii
1956 Supreme Court strikes down segregation of races on public buses
1960 Sammy Davis Jr marries Swedish actress May Britt
1969 VP Spiro T Agnew accused network TV news depths of bias & distortion They got a few things right, Spiro.
1970 VP Spiro Agnew calls TV executives "impudent snobs" He just wouldn’t give it up, yet.
1982 Korean boxer Duk Koo Kim fatally injured when KOed by Ray Mancini
1982 Vietnam War Memorial dedicated in Washington DC
1986 US violates Iran arms boycott We are slow learners.
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BRUCE A. BRENNAN
DEKALB, IL 60115
COPYRIGHT 2010

Email: brucebrennanlaw@aol.com
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