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The Feline Geometer at Night: Bed+Space+Time
Where cat math meets particle physics . . .
Although I have submitted my recent article, “The Feline Geometer,” to the prestigious Journal of Cat Cleverness, I am still awaiting a response. But of course — JCC is a peer-reviewed publication, and the cats on the reading committee nap quite a bit. So it may take a while.
In the meantime, a number of the article’s early readers have suggested that I consider this frequently asked question:
How do cats contrive to take up so much space in an average bed?
Almost universally, humans who are allowed to sleep with their cats find themselves confined to smaller and smaller areas of the bed as the night progresses — while the cat occupies an ever-larger proportion of the space. Although humans periodically attempt some sort of reconfiguration, before long the cat will have expanded again.
So let’s look at how that happens.
I have broken this problem down into three different parts, each requiring a different use of math and physics. Which is interesting in itself, given that cats seem to combine all three effortlessly — and do so while appearing to be sound asleep . . .