Southern New York witnessed a partial eclipse while our neighbors to the north had an angle on a total block-out of the sun.
The much-hyped solar eclipse peaked at 3:25 pm today in the New York City area, where the angle afforded us a 90 percent obstructed view of our system’s star.
I spent those few minutes squinting through a pair of NASA-approved solar glasses, warnings from ophthalmologists echoing in my head.
Being able to gaze upon it directly was pretty cool, although I wonder how the humans of centuries past managed to study the phenomenon without blinding themselves.
I viewed the eclipse from Rye Town Park, a shoreline park adjacent to Rye Playland, a historic amusement park. A few hundred people had the same idea and the parking lot was as full as it gets on hot summer days when crowds head to the nearby beach. Some used solar glasses, some had homemade pinhole viewers, and a few people sat in their cars and smoked weed while waiting for peak viewing time. (The smell is ubiquitous since legalization.)
I spent more time looking at the nearby duck pond and its residents, mindful of warnings not to exceed three minutes of eclipse viewing time even with proper eyewear.
Several mated pairs of ducks waddled around, quietly quacking and seemingly unbothered by the solar phenomenon. It was darker than usual, although not as dark as one might expect given the amount of obstruction.
As for Bud, if he exhibited any strange behavior, I didn’t witness it. When I got home he was much more interested in the Chewy shipment and his brand new box:
Although he may appear to be a small cat in this photo, he asks me to remind readers to note the viewing angle, which makes his considerable meowscles look much smaller than they actually are. In reality he remains a terrifying beast, nearly indistinguishable from a tiger.
If you’re viewing today’s eclipse, stay safe and protect your eyes!
As the masterminds behind the genius heist, Buddy and his associates stand to become extraordinarily wealthy in cardboard boxes, making them the envy of all felines.
NEW YORK — Crammed into a small, smokey room, the felines huddled around a table laden with cocktails, cigars and architectural schematics for a large arena.
Seated at the table was Salvatore “Carniclaws” Catzarelli, Tomasso “Tommy Two Times” Felinzano, Jimmy “Little Jim” Fitzpawtrick, Desmond “Sensimeowla” Neville, a group of junior associates and Buddy the Cat.
“This here boxing is a goldmine, fellas,” Buddy told the other gangster cats, pointing a paw at the original building plans for Madison Square Garden. “The humans, they don’t want to share their boxes, which is why they guarded the secret of boxing from us cats. They want us to be satisfied with one lousy box every week or two. But we’re onto ’em now, see?”
Thousands of glorious boxes litter the central court at Madison Square Garden in New York. Now that cats are wise to the human sport of “boxing,” humans won’t be able to hoard all the boxes to themselves anymore.
Neville licked the edge of his rolling papers, carefully adding potent catnip as he meowed without looking up.
“Mi finna be down wit da heist, mon,” he said, wrapping the paper tight around a generous portion of ‘nip. “Long as di score gonna be split equitably, ya hear?”
“That’s right,” Catzarelli nodded, digging into the pockets of his trench coat for a lighter, which he passed to Neville. “Youse guys know, there’s five of us so we split it nice and even, 15 percent each!”
A smile barely crinkled the corners of Buddy’s mouth before it vanished.
“Of course, my friend,” he said. “You’ll all walk away with 15 percent of the proceeds. If I’m right and this ‘boxing match’ is the goldmine I think it is, we’ll be richer in boxes than we ever imagined! Boxes for every mood and sleeping position. Boxes for your friends and guests. Boxes inside boxes inside boxes!
Felinzano and associates refine plans for the first boxing heist in the history of catdom.
One of the junior associates, a kitten named Crispy, raised a paw.
“Uh, sirs, with all due respect,” he said, “I don’t think boxing is what you think it is. There are two humans in a ring and…”
Buddy cut the kitten off with a wave of his paw.
“Crispy?”
“Yes sir?”
“Who’s the criminal mastermind in this room?”
The kitten looked unsure of himself. “You, uh…you are, sir.”
“That’s right. And who pulled off the legendary turkey heist of 2018?”
“You did, sir, it’s just…”
Buddy held up a paw.
“Unless you wanna be known as Extra Crispy from now on, I’d pipe down if I was youse,” Felinzano told the kitten.
As of press time, the feline criminal ring was putting the final touches on the genius heist, so close to being unimaginably wealthy in boxes that they could almost taste it.
Buddy the Cat tours a trio of elegant box homes in the new season of HGTV’s popular series Box Hunters.
NEW YORK — Will he go with the “modest” 32-room castle, the manor with elegant cardboard balconies or the minimalist keep with high walls and strong fortifications?
Viewers of HGTV’s hit show, Box Hunters, will have to tune in on Wednesday, Dec. 13 to find out!
The episode will air on fHGTV, (Feline HGTV), the network’s cat-centric sister station, and will follow Buddy the Cat as his box estate agent shows him three unique properties.
“Buddy the Cat is a young professional whose hobbies include taking over the world, gorging on turkey and getting high on catnip,” the narrator says in the episode’s opening sequence. “He’s looking for a property that will fit in his living room, can accommodate a nuclear bunker and serve as a headquarters for planning world domination, all while providing pleasant spaces to entertain guests. Can he find a box house that will fit his criteria? Find out in this episode of Box Hunters!”
Like many cats who are featured on the show, Buddy has a predetermined list of features he considers absolutely necessary, including a complete lack of doors, no baths, and quiet napping chambers.
“It has to have a certain je ne sais quoi as a dwelling meant for me and not just some regular cat, of course,” Buddy said. “But it needn’t be unnecessarily elaborate.”
Patches, the box estate agent, told Buddy they’d “start with something modest” while leading him to a towering box castle with a grand staircase and wide front entrance.
A modest box castle design toured by Buddy the Cat.
“I like the understated design of this one,” Buddy said. “The ground floor entrance leads directly into the Grand Napping Chamber with smaller, more private napping accommodations accessible from the main chamber.”
Patches nodded.
“And you can see here, the litter box room is filled with all the modern amenities, including a pad that catches stray litter and a cardboard floor designed to look like marble,” she said. “Stepping out into the grand foyer, we have ample storage space in the adjoining closets for all your toys, your catnip stash and your weapons. It’s even got a Roomba garage!”
A second design, which Patches labeled “more of a classically styled castle,” features a pair of ground-level entrances, several balconies, and “ample space for walking the upper parapets.”
“The wrought cardboard filigrees are fabulous,” Buddy said, running a paw along a faux window where dozens of holes had been punched through to create a screen effect.
Finally they toured a minimalist keep that filled most of Buddy’s requirements but didn’t have all the bells and whistles.
“The good news is, it’s significantly less than your budget of 50 cans of wet food,” Patches said. “You’ll have cans left over for renovations and to customize the space. And moving along here past the master naproom, this doorway leads out to the central courtyard. This is a really nice space for entertaining, especially in the summer months when it’s warm out and you and your friends might want to dine outside on kibble, turkey, mouse or whatever your preference may be.”
Catch the full episode on Wednesday, Dec. 13 at 7:30 p.m.!
An order from Chewy brought food, a new laser pointer and catnip, but Bud was most excited about the box because, well, because he’s a cat!
We’ve covered some heavy stuff lately, so I thought we’d get the week off to a happy start by turning things over to Buddy, who has a very important message.
“I have a new box. Behold my new box, humans! It is new and comfortable, and it smells like catnip and silvervine since my servant ordered a new tub of the stuff. Yes, he has done well. I am pleased.”
Buddy testing out his new box.“Yes, this will do nicely, human.”
The shipment brought quite a few goodies for the Budster including a new laser pointer, two months’ worth of wet food and catnip.
We don’t normally endorse products on PITB, but we’re making an exception for From the Field’s catnip and silvervine blend not only because Bud loves the stuff, but also because it calmed him down and soothed his stomach when he was hurting last month.
I gave him some before I brought him to the veterinary hospital and again four or five days later when he had a little relapse. Both times he was crying and yowling in distress, and both times the catnip-silvervine blend settled him down, relieving his pain enough so he was able to rest comfortably and go to sleep. It’s a horrible feeling when your cat’s suffering and you can’t do anything to relieve the pain. This stuff did the trick and will have a permanent place in the Buddy Cupboard.
Finally, I created a new image of the little dude. What you’re looking at is a render based on a photograph of Bud, which was then run through an AI natural language processor with instructions not to alter the substance of the image, but to give it more of a surreal look. The image below is not actually what I was going for, and sometimes the failures can produce nice images in what Bob Ross would call “happy little accidents.” But it is a way to take a subpar camera phone shot, one in which I liked Buddy’s expression and pose but couldn’t fix the blurry bits, and turn it into something interesting.
Cats are at the heart of one of the most famous thought experiments in science.
If you’ve spent time around physics types, listened to media appearances by science educators like Michio Kaku and Brian Greene, or even watched episodes of The Big Bang Theory, you’ve almost certainly heard of Schrödinger’s cat.
But what is it, why is it important, and what does it really have to do with cats? Most importantly, if you’re a cat lover, does it involve harming cats?
I promise you, if you stick with me and have a little patience, you’ll not only understand Schrödinger’s cat, but a hugely important element of physics will be demystified for you.
Let’s take a step back. First, we all learned in school that Isaac Newton was the “father of physics,” and Albert Einstein came along about two centuries later, revolutionizing physics by adding to Newton’s work and coming up with his own, more accurate model.
To this day, Newton and Einstein are in a class by themselves among physicists because they single-handedly changed everything we know about the natural world.
We all remember the famous story about Newton watching an apple fall from a tree, wondering why the apple fell down instead of up, and eventually developing his theory of gravity. Newton went on to develop his theories, which describe everything we see in the natural world, from that apple falling to the complexities of orbital mechanics.
Everything seemed to work perfectly, until a physicist named Max Planck came along in 1905 and published a paper introducing quantum physics.
What is quantum physics?
Now the word “quantum” has been incorporated into practically everything these days and has been so utterly abused as a marketing buzzword, a way to add a veneer of science to things that are otherwise nonsense, that it’s essentially a meaningless word to most people. Practically everything is described as quantum, from deodorants to claims of psychic telepathy.
But the gist of it is this: While Newtonian physics does indeed describe everything we see with our own eyes accurately, it does not accurately describe things at the subatomic level.
In other words, there are two sets of rules in our universe. Everything larger than an atom behaves according to one set of rules in our universe, and everything the size of an atom or smaller — which includes subatomic particles — behaves according to a different set of rules.
Not only that, but at the quantum scale, things get really, really weird.
They behave in ways that are completely at odds with everything we intuitively understand about reality, so much so that even Einstein himself was disturbed by what he found. Einstein famously described quantum entanglement — the ability of two different objects to be linked and share properties, regardless of how far apart they are — as “spooky action at a distance.”
So what the hell does this have to do with cats?
Ready to get even weirder?
Thanks to Planck, Einstein, John Stewart Bell and innumerable physicists — who are still studying these concepts, and still winning Nobel prizes for them in 2022 — we know that two particles can be “entangled” and will remain that way no matter how far apart they are.
You could take one particle, transport it 10,000 light years away, and it would still be entangled with the other particle.
But it gets even stranger than that.
Our entangled particles have certain properties, such as their spin, which are unknowable until we measure them. In fact, they exist simultaneously in all possible states until the moment when we observe them, at which time the wave function “collapses.” It’s called quantum superposition.
Not only that, but when we measure one particle in an entangled pair, the second particle’s wave also “collapses” (settles on a certain state) and we know its spin instantaneously, regardless of how far apart the particles are.
If I measure an entangled particle here on Earth and find its spin is up, I know the corresponding particle that’s been moved to, say, Epsilon Eridani, 10.47 light years away, is spin down.
You can see why this would be profoundly disturbing to scientists. It violates the speed of light, and it’s completely counterintuitive. How can the mere act of observation change something in the physical world, and how can it change something else potentially thousands or millions of light years away? Everything we know, every gut instinct we have, screams that this should not be true.
But it is true.
These aren’t just ideas kicked around by scientists smoking the sticky stuff, by the way. They’ve been proven experimentally many times over. No matter how much we might dislike the idea, no matter how weird or spooky it may seem, it’s true.
Enter Erwin Schrödinger, an Austrian physicist. He devised a thought experiment that goes like this:
Imagine you have a sealed box with a cat inside. Inside the box are two buttons: One button feeds the cat a yummy treat, the other button kills the cat. There is an equal (50/50) chance of the cat pressing either button. (Other versions use a more complex system involving radioactive material, or poison, that could kill the cat, again with a 50/50 chance.)
We don’t know if the cat is alive or dead until the moment we open the box. So in this thought experiment, we can think of the cat as both alive and dead until we “measure” or “observe” by opening the box.
That’s what’s happening in the above example of quantum entanglement and the idea that a particle is neither in one position or another until we measure it.
Why is measurement the key here? No one knows. Scientists are still arguing about that. Some believe that there’s some special quality of consciousness that interacts with the universe, so the mere act of observing something can change physical reality.
Others scoff at that idea and insist we’re missing something, that it’s not the act of observation that determines the final state of a particle at all.
Regardless, the important thing here for cat lovers is that Schrödinger’s cat is just a thought experiment.
Schrödinger never had a cat, as far as anyone has been able to ascertain, and no one has used an actual cat in an attempt to reconstruct the thought experiment because 1) You wouldn’t learn anything, since cats are not subatomic particles, and 2) Anyone intelligent enough to be a physicist is presumably intelligent enough to understand how absurd, pointless and cruel it would be to use a living being in an experiment that can’t give you any answers.
For those of us who aren’t geniuses, here’s Sheldon explaining the thought experiment as a child (in Young Sheldon) and as an adult (in The Big Bang Theory):
Pain In The Bud 