Author: brianleech

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The Fascination with Falling Felines

The Purr-fessor at Study

A review of

Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics. By Gregory J. Gbur. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.  ISBN 978-0-300-23129-8. Pp. 352.

by Purr-fessor Linus Cattington

When clumsy humans fall down they just land, splat, on their faces, bums, or sides! What undignified behavior! Just last week I watched my owner tumble down a set of icy stairs in the most ridiculous way possible. It’s honestly a wonder their species has survived for so long.

Given humans’ lack of coordination, it’s not surprising that they’ve meow-veled at cats’ innate ability to land on our feet. Human scientists have therefore spent centuries trying to figure out just how we do it. Dr. Gregory Gbur’s Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics describes humans’ attempts to understand what makes us so purr-fect.

People a-purr-rently call cats’ ability to land on our feet the “righting reflex.” Gbur tracks humans’ scientific discoveries about this reflex. Readers hear about physiologists, including Étienne-Jules Marey, who used high-speed cameras to take photos of falling cats, and the team of Rademaker and ter Braak, who determined the most important component of cats’ rotation reflex: our patented “bend and twist” manuever (145). Other scientists used cats as models for astronauts when they wanted to figure out how people should turn over when floating in space. Humans even investigated “high rise syndrome” (185), which is apparently a relatively common event: cats falling from skyscrapers! (Don’t worry–we’re mostly unharmed after such an ordeal…but please don’t try it.) More recently, humans have created robots that emulate our impressive reflex.

At first I worried that humans might be inspired by this book to throw me out of a window. I therefore a-purr-ciated Gbur’s warning not to purposefully drop cats. And don’t get me started on “the most famous cat in all of physics”: Schrödinger’s imaginary, but clearly endangered, cat (277). Cats are not your test subjects, humans!

The person who understood this fact best was British scientist Giles Brindley. Because rabbits enjoy a similar righting reflex to cats, he chose to spin them, and not cats, in an elliptical catapult to learn more. Alas, Brindley failed to show this same intelligence when he invented an electronic instrument called the “logical bassoon” (148). Cats know it’s not logical to play any bassoon when you can just walk across the piano keys.

My fur-verite section of the book comes at the end, when we learn about human/cat teams of scientists. Physicist Robert Williams Wood owes some of his notoriety in spectroscopy to a dedicated cat, who cleaned his large spectorograph by walking through it. Nikola Tesla’s cat, Mcak, taught him about static electricity, while astronomer Edwin Hubble benefited from the expertise of a black cat by the name of Nicolas Copernicus. Most impressive is F.D.C. Willard, the first cat published in a prestigious human scientific journal–a task he likely took on to both bolster the career of his human co-author, Jack H. Hetherington, and to impress Marge Hetherington, Jack’s wife, who reportedly “takes it as a point of personal pride that she can say that she slept with both authors of the paper–often simultaneously” (286). Since that time Willard has thankfully stuck to scientific journals run by cats, where we mostly study humans and why they don’t understand the clear instructions we provide about food, brushing, and going outdoors.

Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics proves an excellent addition to the hiss-story of human science. Let’s hope it encourages more cat-human collaborations…and less dropping of cats.

To find your own copy of this book click here!

Note: This review was originally composed for an important, yet short-lived intellectual home for the scholarly cat-munity: Cat’s Meow Quarterly. Back in 2021, Dr. Cattington had been in contact to become a catributor. Unfortunately, the publication went defunct before the Purrfessor’s submission had been received. Hence this book review sat amongst his many brilliant unpublished works. Upon his passing, Cattington’s editor and friend discovered this review in his dusty files and decided to bring it to publication.

Categories
Mining Research

Western Coal & States Rights in the 1970s

Photo by the author, a coal mine in Wyoming, 2018.

One of the privileges of being born in Montana and having in-laws in South Dakota is that I’ve had the chance to visit the Powder River Basin a number of times. It’s a region in Montana and Wyoming that now supplies around 40% of the nation’s coal. My most recent visit to the basin came during the Mining History Association’s 2018 conference in South Dakota’s Black Hills–an event that included a fantastic visit to the Wyodak Mine (run by Black Hills Power).

The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated a trend away from coal across both the U.S. and the world. Back in the 1970s, though, coal was actually experiencing an American revival. A document that I viewed on a research trip a few years ago to the Montana Historical Society provides some context to that era’s energy debate.

On May 16, 1974, Jack A. Barnett, Executive Director of the Western States Water Council, composed a worried report that rebuked the federal government’s approach to energy.

The Western States’ Water Council consisted of representatives appointed by the governors of western states. (The council, formed in 1965, still exists today.) Barnett was sounding the alarm. The Organization of Arab Petroleum Countries (OAPEC) had proclaimed an oil embargo in 1973 in response to U.S. efforts to supply the Israeli military. The resulting crisis, which lasted well into 1974, meant gas lines for blocks and a panic across the U.S. In November 1973 President Richard Nixon called for “Project Independence.” The project sought to bolster domestic energy sources so that the U.S. would no longer have to depend on foreign oil. A rush to the Great Plains and western mountains for energy sources like coal, oil shale, and uranium ensued.

Most governments of western states were clearly unprepared for the sudden increase in energy development. As Barnett wrote to the water resources staff and council:

“There are rumors and indications that in the national interests the rights of the Western States may have to be scrutinized. States’ rights may interfere with high priority national energy development plans.”

New coal generating plants on the western plains were of particular concern to states like Montana. Barnett worried about the large amounts of water needed for these plants, including four proposed facilities at Colstrip in Montana. Would the American West simply serve as an exporter of coal energy to the rest of America? Would it have more say in the economic and environmental impact of energy development?

The western energy boom indeed meant additional mining across the West, much of which was welcomed by western communities, but some of which came under attack by residents worried about their land, water, and rights.

While both oil shale development and uranium mining underwent a bust during the early 1980s, coal mining on the Plains, particularly in the Powder River Basin, continued apace, over-taking Appalachian coal mining in its output. Although most mining historians focus on the industry’s more distant past, it’s worth thinking more about this more recent history as we determine why coal mining persists in some places but not in others. (Thankfully, historians like Ryan Driskell Tate are now starting to dive into the history of Powder River coal.)

It’s also worth thinking more about fights over outsiders’ intrusions–whether those outsiders represented corporate interests or the federal government. The American West’s history seems replete with “states’ rights” rhetoric, even when it comes to mining.  

Document: Jack A. Barnett to the Water Resources Committee, May 16, 1974, Folder 21 “Office of the Governor, 1974,” Box 4, Record Series 443: “Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, Director’s Office Records,” Montana Historical Society (Helena, Montana).

Categories
teaching

Public Projects in a Course: Why?

The Augustana College bell tower in winter

I’m reaching the end of my first J-term (January term) at Augustana. We had one last year too, but I didn’t teach then. This term, my students worked incredibly hard to create a digital exhibit about the history of disease at our college. I’m really proud of them for pushing through to the end–the last days of these kinds of projects are always extra exhausting because I’m busy offering feedback and they’re struggling to get the last bits of script/image gathering/editing done. The end result is pretty cool, though–a mix of timelines, infographics, and StoryMaps alongside some of the artifacts themselves. Plus, we all “showed our work” by providing links to all of the documents we found and the spreadsheets where we registered their content. It’s an especially impressive product given the fact that our entire course lasted about three weeks long. Yet we still have 10 oral histories, a good 200+ old newspaper articles logged into research spreadsheets, and a whole exhibition to show for it.

As they are for students, public projects are often a lot of extra work for me too. I care more about the output than I might otherwise because their work goes out to the public under my name. I therefore take a fine tooth comb to their work and I have to build the bigger structure into which their work fits.

So why, if it’s more work for both me and my students, do I still get drawn into public projects with my undergraduate students?

  1. Audience: Public projects provide students with a bigger audience–a real audience different from what they’re used to. The audience is no longer just me, their stodgy old professor, but their families, their friends, other faculty, and maybe even administrators like the President of our college. Students therefore get to think about how audience shapes their rhetorical choices–a process that gets more and more necessary as they move into different parts of the working world.
  2. Quality: It could just be me, but I often find that the fact of a bigger, broader audience means that students often do particularly impressive work. Many of them frankly care more about an exhibition that they can share with their families than they do about pleasing their professor. Sure, I’m still giving them a grade, but my judgment probably matters less to them than the judgment offered by people they, you know, actually care about.
  3. Format: I like the fact that public projects–whether they’re digital or in-person, for a broad-based web audience or for a particular organization–all ask students to research, think, and communicate in formats new to them. Some students thrive when they’re not writing papers but instead giving speeches, writing design panels, or creating reports for a community organization. The change in format can often be invigorating to both students who dislike papers and students who love them.
  4. They’re Like Jobs: Hopefully, these projects are like fun jobs, but in many ways, they’re a lot more like the kinds of jobs that students end up doing outside of and beyond college. For one thing, I operate much more like students’ boss–well, really, their project manager. They’re necessarily “group projects”–something that students often hate. I get it. I typically didn’t like group projects either. Yet, much of my life, yes, even as a professor, happens through group projects. There are group projects for committees at the college. There are group projects for scholarly organizations. Some of my research ends up being a group project. Although college professors typically retain a fair amount of freedom, we also often have to work within curricular frameworks developed by–and with–others. Hence, even our individual teaching can feel like a group project. I hope that these projects give students a taste of the working world within the confines of a course. At least they won’t get fired!