when airborne cats and drones will always level out so they can land on their feet
so what would happen if we did this it's probably almost 10 years ago now that i first heard of the
concept known as the "buttered cat paradox" which shouldn't be confused with butted cat but the idea
is that when a cat is dropped from a height it always lands on its feet comparably if you drop a
piece of butter toast it'll always land face down based on this is an idea that if you strap a piece
of butter toast to the back of a cat and then drop the cat from a height the toast and the cat will
rotate perpetually each trying to out manoeuvre the other in an effort to land on the ground first
this perpetual motion could then be used as an infinite source of energy well i guess until
like starvation sets in or the cat gets extreme motion sickness i don't know i'm not a cat doctor
the question first came about back in 1988 during a routine by an entertainer named Michael Davies
if a cat always lands on his feet and bread always lands butter side down
what would happen if you butted your bread and strapped on the back of a cat
it has since been knocking around the place in various magazines and animations ever since
to my surprise though some people have actually tested this out however like you'd guess the
results aren't looking that promising for example in this test and other similar tests on YouTube
like many people have noted it's most likely failed because a strap interferes with the butters
special powers that make the toast land face down and for this French guy even though he did some
solid groundwork on his le movement perpetual i believe his experiment has likely failed
because it appears he's used a dead cat however even if you change the cat's living status to
not dead and the toast mounting issue is resolved it appears the likely reason most of these
attempts will fail is because it turns out toast only has an 80 chance of landing butted side down,
yeah apparently proper research is also being done on this too unlike toast however a cat's ability
to land on its feet is actually very consistent and their technique for achieving it is pretty
damn good i've observed this myself with the machine i made to offer uninvited neighborhood
cats a drink in my backyard but surprisingly this has also been really well tested by others too
dropping old-school 1800s tabby toilet rug from a height was one of the first subjects to be used
to test an early motion film camera this camera captured 12 frames per second and was perfect
for stunning the motion of things for the very first time including cats landing on their feet it
didn't prove too popular for children's portraits though most likely because it looked like a gun oy
smile kid so when a cat versus the ground even when dropped upside down the cat writing reflex
always wins unless the cat versus nasa that's right you smart ass cats are buggered now
but we don't live in zero gravity and i've always thought the secret to making
this cat butter paradox work would be to get rid of the toast and simply strap two cats together
back to back and drop them then with the power of cat rotation and science and numbers pi equations
will have the perfect perpetual motion machine and infinite power to test this out you'd think
it'd be easy with my almost constant supply of neighborhood cats but I've never been able to
successfully grab two of them and if i did some reason they're always wet and covered
in confetti so taping them together might be a bit hard so because of that i shelved my free energy
experiment idea but i was still curious what would happen then a few years ago i was watching youtube
and it was this Australian video where they were demonstrating how the older dji phantom drone
models could not only be tilted sideways but could be completely inverted and dropped and then like a
cat they'll do everything in their power to level out instantly on a side note though this doesn't
work for modern drones which just turn off if you turn them upside down which is boring they kind of
just give up on life like a turtle on its back on this video i saw this comment though and i thought
hell yes i gotta try that it's the closest thing i'll ever get to being able to test out my cat
back to back idea so i thought we got to give this a go because at that time i happen to have
exactly that two dji phantom drones one that we use for filming stuff and the other i purchased
to harvest its bits and pieces to turn into a flying "Esky" so before i chopped it up i
thought yep let's give this a go and i filmed it and the footage has kind of been sitting there and
i haven't got around to editing it and that's what this video is now science time how do drones do
this well if we limit our research strictly to dji promotional videos it explains it well sometimes
when drones are flying they can explode which is good because it shows us their secret inside bits
look at all that cool stuff in there there's like the circuit board and the other bit the silver
block they're always good probably some springs and stuff in there as well springs are in all
good high quality things like top of the line cassette recorders but all of this stuff allows
the drone to do cool things like paint white dots on whatever the [ __ ] you want dots on a tree
done dot matrix rocks you got it spotty bison no worries or even convert your local park into an
80s stock market graph overlaid on a landscape they can even do lines wavy lines and dots
laser eyes but apart from all these cool features most importantly there are bits that know when the
drone's getting a bit on the pit if you try and force one of these things sideways it knows and
it'll control z that like that but in answer to the question how do drones actually do that
it's because of magic now let's move on and test this out now sorry to disappoint but obviously we
know they're probably not going to fly and i didn't want to just smash too expensive
drones at the time but i still want to know what would happen and how they'll behave and the good
news is unlike cats it's pretty easy to trick drones into thinking they're already in the air
so i figured i should suspend them in the air while allowing them to pivots completely freely
and if done on a rope that's a little loose we'll get an idea of where this bird might go
if we let it out of its cage so i've grabbed the drones and marked out the centers of the landing
gear so we get them nice and balanced then i've used a pvc tube between the skids to act as a hub
and then thread the rope through i've chucked some blocks of wood in which i painted in phantom
drone white then for the attachments we'll use an elegant carbon fiber clamping system
now get just a bunch of cable ties seems a bit loose all the cable ties just trim them up
and done however when i gave it a bit of a spin on my fingers it turns out the phantom 4 is slightly
heavier i probably should have thought of that when i previously read reviews that said the
phantom 4 is slightly heavier so i thought the easiest way to get these guys balanced would be
while they're on the rope so it's rope time i just strung up the rope between the columns in the shed
and pulled it tight with a ratchet strap which is also how i straightened up the entire shed when i
picked it up while building it i've then put it up on the rope and taped some weights onto the
phantom 3 to make the two evenly balanced there we go it's like an electronic ninja star or something
for the initial test i just started one of the drones and in theory it should stay upright
due to all its internal robot guts telling it all the things about the earth
he springs to life and you can hear him doing just that doing everything he can to try and level out
he doesn't like being sideways at all i even give him a little bump on the controls but his AI says
nah not interested and you can see here the wind from his props is making the props on the other
drone spin maybe we could make a wind turbine generator that's powered by drones yeah that's
right you physics i shut the phantom 3 down and then i give the phantom 4 its own solo test as
well and his thrust spools up the other drone's props big time i've then given the throttle full
stick just to see what it does and it seems to find itself in a bit of a death wobble which
is a bit worrying but we've come this far for this dodgy test so it's time to test this out with both
drones running and as an extreme safety measure i've put a cushion on the ground under the drones
okay class before we start maybe just for fun have a bit of a guess in the comments before you watch
with your theory on what you think will happen some of my guesses were that possibly the wash
from each drone's propellers would simply cancel each other out giving neither propulsion and the
drones just kind of sit there doing a bunch of nothing or an awesome battle will happen with
each train outmanoeuvre the other to be on top until the direction is established and they'll
start looping over each other faster and faster in a perpetual butted cat's spin or maybe there'll be
some crap software thing and nothing will happen and i'll just make a video where nothing happens
and just kind of talk about the history of camera guns okay it is go time i've roped Kristen into
this dumb idea to control one of the drones i've also chucked on a welding glove because
it turns out they need to be level to allow the motors to start so once it's running and staying
level i have to stick my hand in and force the thing upside down meanwhile it will be trying to
lawnmower this out of my hand it also turns out drones cameras get really confused when they are
inverted so i had a bit of fun teasing their robot brains all right enough of that i have the phantom
3 running and then force it upside down while it does everything it can to try and stop me then
kristen gets the phantom 4 started high-tech cable ties are holding up okay and we're ready for this
proof-of-concept perpetual cat rotation machine i release them and wear off the later model phantom
4 is just dominating it though i reckon the phantom 3 is having a fair crack at trying to
flip him over you can see him taking some quick nervous glances up at the phantom 4 but the p4 is
just staring him down i stick my hand into our new blender and then try and encourage a bit of a spin
but nothing well the phantom 3 almost has it for a second there but the p4's ground game is just
too strong he flips him back down every single time enthusiastic fist pump from kristen there
either because it's a clear win by her phantom 4 or that she knows i'll have to give up on my cat
on cat perpetual motion dream and fix the laundry plumbing instead it's bugger i didn't have two
of the same drone because clearly we need two of the same model to have an equal test just as one
last test though i thought i'd level the playing field by removing the weights from the phantom 3.
we fire up the drones again but it still looks like the phantom 4 has the upper hand with its
power advantage we tried some advanced drone pilot techniques with the controls you know
like flicking the sticks around with your thumbs and smashing the various buttons on the controls
with our wrists but it was no good there is still no cat taped to a cat's perpetual spin happening
personally i'm pretty disappointed but i guess it will save me the time
in not bothering rounding up some cats but overall i guess this is a result if you did
have two cats and strap them together back to back for a free fall the likelihood that one is
slightly stronger than the other will always be a factor in the cat on cat perpetual motion machine
have a think about subscribing so i can do more videos for you instead of fixing the laundry
plumbing i'm craigo turner youtube channel is turner81 and something about next time