The Buttered Cat Paradox

Prints
Copied!

👇 Get new sketches each week

The Buttered Cat Paradox goes like this:

Cats always land on their feet
Falling toast always lands butter side down

So what will happen if you strap buttered toast to the back of a falling cat?

Presumably, the cat righting reflex will fight against the pull of the buttered toast.

John Frazee proposed the buttered cat paradox in a July 1993 competition in Omni magazine, including a practical application based on the inevitable hovering that must result:

"When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and when toast is dropped, it always lands with the buttered side facing down. I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat. The two will hover spinning, inches above the ground. With a giant buttered cat array, a high-speed monorail could easily link New York with Chicago."

The Buttered Toast Phenomenon

Incidentally, the buttered toast phenomenon—why toast always lands butter side down—was the subject of an experiment on the British TV show QED, finding that buttered toast, when thrown into the air, landed equally on the buttered and unbuttered sides. However, Robert Matthews conducted a mathematical analysis of toast falling, as it would more commonly, from the edge of a table. His work showed that landing buttered-side down is the most likely result given the height of an average table, the gravitational constant, and the typical mass of toast. It won him an Ig Nobel Prize in 1996.

Buttered toast has been falling for a long time. There's an 1884 poem by James Payn:

I never had a slice of bread,

Particularly large and wide,

That did not fall upon the floor,

And always on the buttered side!

The Cat Righting Reflex

The innate ability for cats to twist around and land on their feet is called the cat righting reflex. They can do this thanks to a very flexible spine and no collarbone.

I dropped no cats in the making of this sketch. Please don't drop cats.

Here's a print of the cat only

More paradoxes

The coastline paradox: the length of a coastline depends on how close you measure
The transparency paradox: the more transparent the workspace, the more privately people behave
The paradox of choice: more choice can make it harder to choose
The automation paradox: the better the machines get, the more we struggle when they fail
The Abilene paradox: a group can take an action that no one thinks is good
The liar paradox: I am lying
The paradise paradox: the belief that moving to paradise will solve all our problems
Jevon's paradox: Fuel efficiency gains tend to increase fuel use

Also see:

Murphy's Law: What can go wrong, will go wrong

Learn more

This archived Scientific American article on the murphodynamics of toast gives more detail about the buttered toast phenomenon.

Published 5 Oct 2025

Get the book!

Big Ideas Little Pictures

Prefer to listen?

Try the podcast

🎉 Help keep Sketchplanations ad-free 🎉 Keep this ad-free 🎉 Help keep Sketchplanations ad-free by supporting me

Keep exploring

The Automation Paradox

Looking back in time as we look to the stars: A visual explanation of how light from the Moon, Sun, stars, and galaxies shows us the past because light takes time to travel.

Looking Back in Time: The Speed of Light and the Night Sky

The Chinese Zodiac calendar featuring the 12 zodiac animals, their personality traits, and corresponding years from 2025 to 2036. Includes traditional Chinese New Year symbols like lanterns, red envelopes, and firecrackers.

The Chinese Zodiac: Animals, Years, and Meanings

The coastline paradox

Apophenia

Murphy's Law

The Automation Paradox is that the better our machines get, the more we struggle when they fail. When heading out for a hike in the woods, it's tempting to skip the map and compass and rely on our phones and apps for navigation. Yet when we encounter no signal or lose power, we can find ourselves in a sticky situation. Or perhaps, like me, you've come to rely on popping your destination into the satnav or Google Maps whenever you get in the car and have nearly forgotten the ability to navigate without it. These situations illustrate the paradox of automation, where the more sophisticated and automated our machines and technologies become, the more bewildered we find ourselves when they inevitably fail. Or: the smarter the machines get, the dumber we might get. In his book Messy, Tim Harford suggests three strands to the paradox as our machines get more sophisticated: Automation covers up our mistakes, hiding our incompetence, meaning we may not learn to correct ourselves—consider autocorrect cleaning up our typos as we go. When we rely on automation, we get less practice for our skills, so even highly skilled individuals may find their expertise diminishing—perhaps you've found yourself using your phone calculator for a trivial calculation. When the easy scenarios are taken care of, failures may occur in complex or unpredictable ways that we may find especially difficult to recover from—like a subtle but persistent failure in the steering of a passenger plane, recovering from a skid on an icy road, or when you're deeply lost in the wilderness. More sophisticated technology can even make it useless or more dangerous when it fails. Older cars used to be reparable forever. Now, if your vehicle fails, it's likely to need plugging in at the dealership to figure out what's up. How many electronic devices are thrown away because somewhere inside, some tiny loose connection or component makes the whole thing worthless? Were pilots and flight crews better prepared and able to improvise before the autopilot became ubiquitous? I often wish our devices would fail more like an escalator or an electric toothbrush. If an escalator fails, you can still walk up it. If your electric toothbrush dies, you can still use it to brush your teeth. These could be called Technology-Enhanced Products, perhaps. But when most of our devices die, they're often rendered worthless. Automation and sophisticated machines help me so much. I did use Grammarly to help check this post. I use Google Maps nearly every time I put in my destination to home, and I often use a calculator to check my maths. But I do pay attention to grammar corrections, bring a paper map when I can, and keep trying to do the maths in my head. But as Tim Harford explains it, we still face "the paradox of automation: the better the machines get, the more bewildered we are when the machines fail." Also see: The bus factor Normalisation of deviance Chaos monkey Know your tech Jevon's paradox The law of unintended consequences The Dunning-Kruger effect (send me proof of purchase of Big Ideas Little Pictures, and I'll send the sketch to you) More paradoxes: The coastline paradox The transparency paradox The Abilene paradox The paradox of choice The liar paradox Tolkein-style landscape inspired by the excellent Lord of Maps.The Automation Paradox is that the better our machines get, the more we struggle when they fail. When heading out for a hike in the woods, it's tempting to skip the map and compass and rely on our phones and apps for navigation. Yet when we encounter no signal or lose power, we can find ourselves in a sticky situation. Or perhaps, like me, you've come to rely on popping your destination into the satnav or Google Maps whenever you get in the car and have nearly forgotten the ability to navigate without it. These situations illustrate the paradox of automation, where the more sophisticated and automated our machines and technologies become, the more bewildered we find ourselves when they inevitably fail. Or: the smarter the machines get, the dumber we might get. In his book Messy, Tim Harford suggests three strands to the paradox as our machines get more sophisticated: Automation covers up our mistakes, hiding our incompetence, meaning we may not learn to correct ourselves—consider autocorrect cleaning up our typos as we go. When we rely on automation, we get less practice for our skills, so even highly skilled individuals may find their expertise diminishing—perhaps you've found yourself using your phone calculator for a trivial calculation. When the easy scenarios are taken care of, failures may occur in complex or unpredictable ways that we may find especially difficult to recover from—like a subtle but persistent failure in the steering of a passenger plane, recovering from a skid on an icy road, or when you're deeply lost in the wilderness. More sophisticated technology can even make it useless or more dangerous when it fails. Older cars used to be reparable forever. Now, if your vehicle fails, it's likely to need plugging in at the dealership to figure out what's up. How many electronic devices are thrown away because somewhere inside, some tiny loose connection or component makes the whole thing worthless? Were pilots and flight crews better prepared and able to improvise before the autopilot became ubiquitous? I often wish our devices would fail more like an escalator or an electric toothbrush. If an escalator fails, you can still walk up it. If your electric toothbrush dies, you can still use it to brush your teeth. These could be called Technology-Enhanced Products, perhaps. But when most of our devices die, they're often rendered worthless. Automation and sophisticated machines help me so much. I did use Grammarly to help check this post. I use Google Maps nearly every time I put in my destination to home, and I often use a calculator to check my maths. But I do pay attention to grammar corrections, bring a paper map when I can, and keep trying to do the maths in my head. But as Tim Harford explains it, we still face "the paradox of automation: the better the machines get, the more bewildered we are when the machines fail." Also see: The bus factor Normalisation of deviance Chaos monkey Know your tech Jevon's paradox The law of unintended consequences The Dunning-Kruger effect (send me proof of purchase of Big Ideas Little Pictures, and I'll send the sketch to you) More paradoxes: The coastline paradox The transparency paradox The Abilene paradox The paradox of choice The liar paradox Tolkein-style landscape inspired by the excellent Lord of Maps.

Newer

RRandom

Older

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.