Grania found this tw**t, and although we already have a surfeit of felids, I thought it was sufficiently awesome to post by itself:
https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/723061893305372673
Max Roser is a researcher at Oxford, and the snow leopard is Panthera uncia.
So much for that Law of Gravity.
To a cat, the law of gravity is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.
As an epidemiologist, Max Roser is someone I follow. His website, Our World in Data
(http://ourworldindata.org), has powerful visuals of population trends.
I want him to post the trends for shift work along with his fantastic coverage of the decline in working hours. (I’ve already tweeted this at him, but just in case he sees this…)
🙂
Snep parkour.
LIGO needs to investigate gravitational anomalies in the vicinity of that cat.
Not just that cat. ALL cats.
Attn: Larry Niven – of a moment it becomes obvious how the Kzinti acquired gravity-polariser technology. They didn’t take it from the Jotoki – they were born with it, but didn’t understand it.
Cool cat!
I remember spending a long time (probably several minutes) as a child throwing a ball into a corner, after I was told that if the ball bounced off two walls it would bounce back to where you threw it from. (Which is approximately, but not exactly, true.)
I never would have guessed that snow leopards would have the same behavior as balls. 🙂
The maths are perfect. Balls and walls aren’t.
Look at the Moon-recession data. Bounced off what they call “corner-cube” reflectors.
Hesitant though I am to say it, but against the brute Laws of Physics, cats aren’t perfect, no matter how little they try.
“I never would have guessed that snow leopards would have the same behavior as balls.”
They have to. A ball bounces off a wall at approximately the same angle to the wall as it arrived. (Very slight change in angle due to friction, angular momentum etc, which you can usually ignore). Same for a light beam and mirrors. Also pool balls and the cushion.
The snow leopard has to follow the same rules *unless* it can get enough grip on the wall with its claws to substantially alter its trajectory. Which it probably can’t.
Looks spectacular on the video though!
cr
and that’s why snow leopards are the awesome!
Snow leopard is the most gorgeous of the big cats. The long bushy tail and enormous paws. There is a longer version of that video here:
http://www.tastefullyoffensive.com/2016/04/snow-leopard-parkour-jumps-off-wall.html
At the start of the video, you hear the cameraman say “do the jump, do the jump”. Her name is Ada. Apparently, she does this at meal time.
http://pickle.ninemsn.com.au/2016/04/21/16/06/dramatic-snow-leopard
I wonder if that’s actually the easier way to get down vs. absorbing the shock of a direct jump to the ground.
Does that phrase actually describe a possible thing? “Go to the store and get some tartan paint and a surfeit of felids.” Doesn’t really work, does it?
Hmmm, and ‘surfeit’ is usually used in connection with comestibles, I believe. Which is probably inappropriate in connection with kittehs.
I seem to recall some English king died of a ‘surfeit of lampreys’, which says something disgusting about mediaeval diets I think.
cr
One of the Johns, I think.
Actually, you may be thinking of hagfish, not lampreys, with their slime-producing defence mechanism. I’ve no particular reason to suspect that the elongate body of a lamprey would be any more disgusting than any other random fish.
Useless fact #437 : among the small number of people in a position to know, the flesh of the (Comoros) coelacanth has a reputation as the foulest-tasting fish ever. Which makes the finding of the Indonesian species in a fish market all the more remarkable.
Henry I, fourth son of William the Conqueror, otherwise known as William the Bastard.
Ah, what a poor little under-privileged Special Snowflake Guillame must have been, coming from a dysfunctional family like that.
Hagfish – lampreys – I’d somehow thought they were the same thing. Maybe not.
Lampreys repulse me by their feeding habits.
(NOT going to Google them, or hagfish, in case I come upon pictures. I’ve just had lunch, don’t wanna lose it 😉
cr
The exact relationships between hagfish, lampreys and other gnathostome vertebrates (let alone the conodont animals and other clades) is still a matter of disagreement.
Gorgeous animal and so lithe !