Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for August 15, 2010

Didn’t the mythbusters do this one?

WWMS? (What will Mom say?–Or Dad, since Jennifer apparently ran off….)

Yay! A Danae classic.

9 out of 10 end up face down! Interesting, but I think I’m batting 1000 without even trying.

… actually it’s 80%. 10% are butter-side up, and 10% were not buttered :) although I will grant you 5% on that one (50% of 10%).

Doesn’t seem messy to me (runs off to submit results to journal)

k.

JanCinVV said, 36 minutes ago

Didn’t the mythbusters do this one?

Ayuh. Season 3, Episode 4.

My old mare loved bread, especially butter topped wheat, the brand name stuff, not the store brand, and she also liked donuts. All but the lemon filled ones, which she regarded as a low down, dirty trick. Bagels were, according to her, very stale, inedible donuts. I’ve been pretty careful to not feed such things to my new horse, as bread is expensive these days. Carrots are much cheaper.

Day old bread is great horse feed. If you can get a steady source from a bakery it makes a great feed supplement. The US Cavalry used to feed it to their horses as part of their standard feed.

@Nabuquduriuzhur

Actually, I think the fact that she’s buttering TOAST may have something to do with it…..

Wiley, is Danae pronounced Dan-nay or Duh-nay?

… dnihilist: a classical Latin pronunciation would be “Duhn-eye” — try it ^_~

It depends on how high she tossed it and if she put a flipping notion on a corner of the slice plus the psi or the barometric pressure and the time of year.

Butter is heavy, bread is light. And your @zz is grass.

Scientific American did an article about this many years ago (probably before Mythbusters). Turns out it’s true, the bread usually lands butter side down. The explanation is that most of the time the bread is slid off the table, imparting a bit of rotational momentum to it… and because most tables are about the same height, most of the time break knocked off a table has just enough time to do one-half rotation on the way down. Hence, butter side down most of the time.

The article also explained why you’re more likely to take an umbrella and not need it or leave it behind and need it than you are to correctly take the umbrella and need it.

Dan - uh- ay.

And if you take an umbrella, whether you need it or not, there’s a 90% chance you’ll leave it somewhere while you’re out.

Of course, Danae, you’re going to clean that all up.

No controversy this morning? Where is my “Non Sequitur” and what have you done with it?

the version of the buttered bread to the floor theory that I heard was:

if you drop a slice of buttered bread on the carpet, the value of the carpeting is in direct proportion to the likelihood of the buttered side landing down

or some such

it’s just another version of murphy’s law I guess—-

murphy was a .prick, wasn’t he?

And when our species was dropped on the planet, did we land butter side up, or not?

Wonder if she’s going to try Wright’s Hypothesis now and strap the buttered bread to the back of a cat. (who always land right side up, of course.)

Dah-neigh?

Since butter is heavier; she should try margarine. It’s lighter and you could get a 50 50 split. Fat free might even do better?

Danae. one question

Does the six second rule still apply and if so, for both sides?

This is one of my all-time Most Favorites. I still have the one cut from the Sunday paper within view. It’s dated Jan. 8, and the most recent year Jan. 8 was on a Sunday was 2006 (the one before that was in 1995). Science IS really messy!

& the results often annoy authorities.

Ummmm…I think she needs more testing…just so the results are more accurate…and her name is pronounced “Evil”…lol

If the buttered-side-down theory is correct, then why do we waste our time buttering people UP…?

Wow, and she’s recording results and everything. Kid would never make it in the business of oil science. There: I tried to be controversial.

Thnx Wiley and guys

Thanks Wiley, but here in my part of New Jersey, we say DAY-nuh.

The heat of the bread… Does things to the head… And as toast is naturally dishonest… Hence the results are dubious at best… So with all the flavor…. In the experiment we savor… Shouldn’t just eating it be the final test?…

The outcomes of this type of experiment can be evaluated using a binomial distribution. With the null hypothesis that there is a 50% probability the butter side lands down, 10 trials and 9 successes. The probably of that occurring by chance alone is less than .098% – one in one thousand.

This phenomenon is known in radio circles as the Heaviside layer and is useful every 11 years.

And what is the probability that I will spill coffee on my white shirt, as I just did? (not because this was too funny, but because I’m not real neat and frequently do this.)

@Wiley:

I realize she’s your creation and therefore you are the ultimate authority, but I always thought Danae was homonymous with deny. Which would be fitting since she is so often in denial…

I don’t spill coffee on my white shirt, but dollars to donuts, if I eat anything with tomatoes in it, they will find a home on my shirt. Conversely, if I wear a red or dark colored shirt, it will remain spotless after having a spaghetti dinner with a glass of red wine.

HowieL, you’re right, 1/1/06. and I still LOVE it!

Some years back, some physicists analyzed the chance that a piece of bread would slide off a table and fall–they showed that the most likely result was a half-turn so the butter side is down. Murphy was right.

Further, they noted, the table height was set by the height of human comfort, and that was limited by the height at which brains would be concussed in a trip, or about 3 meters. So, in any reasonable world, Murphy was right.

Hi - pretty sure no one is reading this since this is two days old, but she should run some controls in her experiment to test for bias:

1) label one side of the bread slightly with marker (assumed near-zero mass), to see if there is bias in how she tosses the bread.

2) drop 50% of the trials starting from butter side up, and 50% of the trials starting from butter side down (getting her hand messy).

As long as it is in the name of science and on a floor that is washable, I have no problem with this. ‘Course I don’t have kids yet (not likely to at this point), so my opinion doesn’t mean much….

I read it, NightOwl19 (i’m a bit behind in my comic reading…), and I think her father needs to put some controls on her scientific method… :)

Nightowls - we do more after 9 PM than most people do all day!