Kill All the Drinking Cats

If I see one more link to another article about how cats drink I just might finally go live in a cave.

For some reason this week's Science magazine thought that news of cutting edge science should include an article about how cats drink water.

I was unaware that this was one of the great scientific problems of our age, but I must have been wrong.

True to form, every publication in the galaxy highlighted the story as if it were a major breakthrough, just as Science magazine knew they would. This is because science journalists, most of who have little scientific training, were thankful to finally have something to write about that they could understand, and that their increasingly uneducated readers could relate to.

Because no one cares that we have no idea what 96% of the Universe is composed of, or how we might solve our long-term climate issues, or even whether our standard view of particle physics is correct.

No, we need to know how cats drink.

What's worse is that I'm sure Science published this article, knowing it had no scientific importance and was merely an application of 150-year old physics, because they knew it would gets lots of attention from the hoi polloi and their magazine's name would be scattered across the publishing universe.

Not that anyone learned anything useful, except that fluid mechanics works. Not that that was ever in any doubt, of course, being a simple application of Newton's 400-yo laws of motion.

We can all be glad, of course, that cats are still escaping dehydration, and that they apparently have the necessary smarts to solve the differential equations to get fluid into their yaps.

But what about raccoons? Horses? Ferrets? I see a great many papers to come....