Theories

Results of a Contest for "Theories" Sponsored by Omni Magazine.

GRAND PRIZE WINNER

When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and when toast is dropped, it always lands with the buttered side facing down. I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat; the two will hover, spinning inches above the ground. With a giant buttered cat array, a high-speed monorail could easily link New York with Chicago.

Footnote:

The magazine subsequently got the following reply from one of its readers:

I've been thinking about this cat/toast business for a while. In the buttered toast case, it's the butter that causes it to land buttered side down - it doesn't have to be toast, the theory works equally well with Jacob's crackers. So to save money I think you just miss out the toast - and butter the cats. Also, should there be an imbalance between the effects of cat and butter, there are other substances that have a stronger affinity for carpet. Consider that the probability of carpet impact is determined by the following simple formula: P = S * t(t)/tc where P is the probability of carpet impact, and S is the "stain" value of the toast-covering substance - an indicator of the effectiveness of the topping in permanently staining the carpet. Chicken Tikka Masala, for example, has a very high S value, while the S value of water is zero. tc and t(t) indicate the tone of the carpet and topping respectively - the value of P being strongly related to the relationship between the colour of the carpet and topping, as even chicken Tikka Masala won't cause a permanent and obvious stain if the carpet is the same colour.

So it is clear that the probability of carpet impact is maximised if you use chicken Tikka Masala and a white carpet - in fact this combination gives a P value of one, which is the same as the probability of a cat landing on its feet. Therefore a cat with chicken Tikka Masala plastered on its back will be certain to hover in mid air. Contrastingly, there could be problems with buttered toast as the toast may fall off the cat, causing a terrible monorail crash resulting in nauseating images of members of the royal family visiting accident victims in hospital, and politicians saying it wouldn't have happened if their party was in power as there would have been more investment in cat-toast glue research. Therefore it is in the interests not only of public safety but also public sanity if the buttered toast on cats idea is scrapped, to be replaced by a monorail powered by cats smeared with chicken Tikka Masala floating above a rail made from white wool shag pile carpet.

RUNNERS-UP

  1. If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite number of pickup trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of highway signs, they will eventually produce all of Shakespeeare's great literary works in Braille.
  2. Why Yawning Is Contagious: You yawn to equalize the pressure on your eardrums. This pressure change outside your eardrums unbalances other people's ear pressures, so they must yawn to even it out.
  3. Communist China is technologically underdeveloped because they have no alphabet and therefore cannot use acronyms to communicate ideas at a faster rate.
  4. The earth may spin faster on its axis due to deforestation. Just as a figure skater's rate of spin increases when the arms are brought in close to the body, the cutting of tall trees may cause our planet to spin dangerously fast.

HONORABLE MENTION

  1. Birds take off at sunrise. On the opposite side of the world, they are landing at sunset. This causes the earth to spin on its axis.
  2. The reason hot-rod owners raise the backs of their cars is that it's easier to go faster when you're always going downhill. Besides, they get better gas mileage that way.
  3. The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian "pahks" his "cah," the lost r's may for example migrate southwest, causing a Texan to "warsh" his truck and invest in "erl wells."