In this column, When toast falls, what’s more likely: Buttered side up or buttered side down?, both the OP and Cecil refer to the “van is always at the corner” effect. I get the selective memory meaning, but why a van, and why at the corner? Is this a well known or widely reported instance of selective memory?
No idea about vans and corners, but the Mythbusters did an experiment on the buttered side down thing. Anybody know what their conclusion was?
Wasn’t there someone who mused: If a cat always lands on its feet, and the buttered side of the toast always lands upside down, what happens if you butter the back of a cat?
More research needs to be done on this. Unless it already has been, of course.
The Mythbusters team built two machines to drop toast: One dropped the toast from a vertical orientation, the other pushed the toast off the edge of a table.
Pushing the toast off the edge of a table resulted in a statistically-significant portion of the toast landing butter-side down. The Mythbusters team explanation for this: When pushing toast off the edge of the table, the toast does just enough of a flip to land consistently with the buttered side down (as mentioned in Cecil’s reply).
However, the results from dropping the toast from a vertical orientation showed that the toast most often landed butter-side up. The Mythbusters noted that the act of physically buttering the toast causes the toast to “bowl” slightly where the butter knife pressed into one side of the toast. This gives the toast an aerodynamic charactaristic that causes it to most often land with the butter side (the top of the “bowl”) facing up.
At least, that’s how I remember it…
Commentary on this subject must pay tribute to Butter Side Up! The Delights of Science, a 1977 book by Dr. Magnus Pyke. On this side of the Atlantic most people will know him better as the eccentric being blinded by science in the Thomas Dolby video, but he’s a well-known personality in England.
Pyke only talks about dropping a vertically held piece of toast from 10 feet or so. He claims that the extra weight of the butter will make the toast fall butter side down about six times out of ten. It’s more about using statistical testing to observe the world than a true test of toast.
Still, a toast to the Good Doctor!
Yes… someone did… now… who was it? I’m thinking it could be Terry Pratchett but I don’t know… that’s bugging me now.
Cecil also mentioned that this chap demonstrated that bipedal creatures can’t exceed 3 metres in height… is this true? How tall were T-Rexes? What about on the moon?
This Wikipedia entry suggests T-rex could be as tall as 5 meters.
Aerodynamic considerations aside, it seems to me the buttered side is more liekely to stick to the floor. If the toast lands butter side first, it will stay there. If it lands plain side first, bounces and flips, again it ends up butter side down. Only if it lands plain side first or edgewise, with the butter side never touching the floor, will it end up butter side up. So it is a little bit harder for the toast to land butter up.
I guess it depends on your definition of “land”: where it first hits the floor or where it finally comes to rest.
OK, so Bacon et al (Lettuce, Tomato, and Mayo were silent on the matter) criticize the lack of experiment, and then they go and replace the toast with a piece of plywood? What the heck kind of science is that? At least use something with a similar density to toast. Better yet, use toast. If you’re worried about variability, use many different pieces of toast, dropped many times each.
If one is to find flaw in Matthews’ work, I would put it rather on the claims of universality. It may well be that there are practical limitations on the size of “people”, and therefore of countertops, due to the fundamental constants of nature. But there are no such limitations on the size of toast. A significantly smaller piece of toast (say, a cracker-like thing) would make multiple complete roations before hitting the floor from a standard, cosmically-dictated countertop. The perversity is then our own, in insisting on eating toast of such an awkward size, rather than cracker-sized, or some intermediate size optimized to land butter-up.
I can’t recall the source, but I first saw this in a perpetual-motion story. The theory was that if you strap a piece of toast on the back of a cat (with the butter away from the fur) and drop the cat, it will hover in mid-air, spinning madly as the cat tries to go feet-side-down and the toast tries to go butter-side-down.
It was a highly humorous essay. Not as good as Isaac Asimov’s thiotimoline paper, but quite funny nonetheless.
For the purposes of Murphy’s Law, as long as the butter hits the floor, your toast is doomed (no one wants to eat buttered floor, so no one wants to eat floored butter). Therefore the definition of “land” is where it finally comes to rest. Although if your toast is sufficiently acrobatic to land butter-down, collect grit, flip, and come to rest butter-and-grit-up, I suppose the definition of “landing butter-down” is “butter hits floor during course of fall”.
That was precisely my thought when I read the article. Sheesh.
BTW, the really fun thing is that when you butter both sides of the toast, it would naturally have to land on edge. Now, if we put a bunch of slices of toast on edge, as in the popular use for dominoes, what happens if we try to tip one over?
RR
My understanding is this is actually a sub-law of Murphy’s Law - The Buttered-side Down Corollary - An object will always fall so as to do the most damage. This applies to any falling object (i.e. a bowling ball à la W.E. Coyote).
Has this ever been observed? I don’t think toast will bounce like that, no matter how far it falls.
We butter our bread on the wrong side.
That’s how I remember that episode too. They also took the toast-launching apparatus onto the roof and launched from there. That turned out almost random - although the toast was “bowled,” you could watch it float and flutter down, and butter-up and butter-down pieces were about 50-50. Really interesting episode.
And yeah, plywood instead of toast? My high school science teacher would have failed that experiment.
I still don’t get “the van is always at the corner” thing. Have I been wooshed?
OK, this one frustrates me no end. It’s patently illogical. We have two premises, here:
1: The cat always lands on its feet.
2: The toast always lands butter-side down.
So how does the cat-toast assembly hovering solve this problem? It violates the first premise, since if the cat never lands, it does not land on its feet. And it also violates the second premise, since if the toast never lands, it does not land butter-side down. Not only does this not solve the dilemma, it makes it worse! We need a scenario in which both the cat and the butter do, in fact, reach the ground, and with their appropriate surfaces. One possibility would be a distortion of the ground so as to envelop the toast-cat assembly as it reaches the surface. Another explanation would be that the cat makes contact with the floor with its paws, and immediately proceeds to roll over onto its back, rubbing the buttered toast against the rug.
Merely an example of confirmation bias. If you look out the window and see a van at the corner that you haven’t seen before, you make a mental note of it, because you’ve seen the same corner hundreds of times and the current situation is new and different and thus worthy of notice. Thereafter, if you look at the corner and there is no van, you make no mental note because the corner is as you have always remembered it. But the occasions where the van is present will make a greater impression because it is a change in the data that seems to be catching on. Ergo, you see the van at the corner whereas you fail to see the corner sans van, and “the van is always at the corner.”