Topical Guide 351
Mark Dorset
Gadgets: Electro-Mechanical
“Herb — my husband — wants to build a gadget to filter the air in our house — when the war is over. He has a good idea, I think: he’s going to bubble the air through barrels of water in the cellar, and all the impurities — even germs — will be left behind in the water. When the house smells stale — you know how a house gets that stale odor when it’s been closed up for a long time during the winter — all we’ll have to do is squeeze a little lemon juice into the water or toss in some pine needles to make the whole house smell fresh again.”
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 14
Share the experience! Build your own:
Mathematics (Applied): Calculating the Volume of an Irregular Solid (a cat)
“You see,” she said, “Herb needs to know the volume of air in the house, of course, but he doesn’t need the precision that I’m going to give him. I could have come up with the figures he needed in a couple of hours, but instead I’m including every nook and cranny. I’m even making allowances for the air displaced by furnishings — and by Herb and me, and our daughter, Ella, and Mrs. Stolz — she lives with us — and even the air displaced by the cat. …. Tom displaces — let me see — 456.19 cubic inches. But, since he’s only in the house 59.95 percent of the time, he only represents, on the average, 273.49 cubic inches — ”
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 14
How do you compute the volume of a cat?
Dunking it in water doesn’t work—you only get the volume of the rat-like creature that lives inside the cat; much like the feeble alien within a Dalek. (And, if your answer had anything to do with contour integrals, get real.)
Here is a low-tech method that works: Using successive approximation, determine the smallest box that the cat will fully enclose itself in, and measure the size of that box. Cats tend to leave a few appendages hanging out of the corners—you may need to assist with folding the cat into the box for the final stages of approximation.
This cat is approximately 648 cubic inches in volume.
Windell Oskay, Co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, “Computing the Volume of a Cat”
See also: Gadgets, Electronic TG 83; TG 84; Impractical Craftsman TG 44, TG 135
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