Scientific Evidence

I don’t intend to cause my readers distresss when posting these blogs but just occasionally I cross someone’s nerve. An example was the day I mentioned a book called Red Herrings and White Elephants. I had been entertained by the author’s explanation of “freeze the balls off a brass monkey” (having to do apparently with brass trays to hold cannon balls on ships in the Napoleonic Wars). Now I didn’t mean to upset the metallurgists amongst my few readers (I didn’t realise that such people read blogs) but there ensued a chorus of “Balderdash” and “Piffle” and “How could you have be so stupid as to actually believe such patent nonsense!”. The metallurgists in refuting the explanation still couldn’t explain the derivation of “freeze the balls off a brass monkey” and nor, it seems, can anyone else.

Not to make the same mistake twice I have now acquired a new trivia book with undoubted pedigree for scientific accuracy – Does Anything Eat Wasps?* – a collection of questions and answers from the “Last Word” column in the New Scientist. Now I’m the last person to understand the physics of it all but I did enjoy the answers to the question whether or not you can safely drop a cat from any height and it will survive (because its terminal velocity is lower than the speed, etc., etc.). A survey has been carried out on injuries to cats who have fallen from varying heights and the conclusion is that if the cat falls from a building less than seven storeys high it should live; if the cat falls from a height in excess of seven storeys it should live; but if the cat falls from the seventh storey (no higher, no lower) it is statistically likely to perish. Falling onto concrete is not to be particularly recommended, and cats can survive falling from the 32nd floor of a building. (Sources: Papers published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medicine Association and Nature).

Since reading this piece (and laughing out loud at it) I have been getting some very strange looks from our ancient cat.

* Bears, frogs and fish (to name a few) eat wasps.