Speaker’s corner

SOME time back I was seeking ideas from readers for a perpetual motion machine and somebody drew my attention to two useful scientific phenomena: One, cats, when dropped, always land feet first and, two, buttered toast when dropped on a carpet – especially an expensive carpet – always lands buttered side down. Everybody knows this of course. Ipso catso, if one ties buttered toast to a cat’s back and drops it over a carpet the cat and toast will spin for ever. With a battery of enough cats and buttered toast, the spinning could create sufficient energy to power a rapid rail system along the length of the North and South Coast.

It has been well documented that the more expensive the carpet the more infallible the buttered toast phenomena.

A reader, Wendy Horn, has suggested a refinement. First create a monorail track made from a white, high quality carpet.

“Instead of butter on the toast, spread chicken tikka masala – because toast spread with chicken tikka masala will definitely try to land face down on a white carpet – while the cat will always try to land on its feet.” We may be getting somewhere. Another reader, Phil Raisin (I am sure he must be a hotshot physicist), says: “The cat and toast will merely spin in one position and not provide forward power. It simply won’t work.”

Roy Chazen agrees: “The cat and the toast would not spin. They would oscillate. The monorail would travel backwards and forwards, so that the passengers wouldn’t know if they were coming or going.”

Raisin went on: “Having delved deeply into the subject I am convinced that forward motion could be achieved by harnessing the limitless source of Kugelpower.”

He explains how one would merely have to connect all the gymnasiums along the coast – especially in uMhlanga Rocks and Ballito where at any given moment there are 5 000 women “spinning” – women who spend their leisure hours alternately eating cake and furiously pedalling stationary bicycles.

“The gymnasiums need only to wire up all the exercise bikes to a vast central turbine to produce enough current (and a man named Raisin must know a lot about currents) to drive quite large trains.”

But why indeed don’t we harness all the energy expended in gymnasiums?

It has been estimated that the rush of New Year “resolutionists” who practically overwhelmed the gyms during the first week in January and have been spinning like mad – some didn’t give up until last week – produced, at peak, 2 300 megawatts.

I recall as a schoolboy (just a few years ago) having a dynamo on my bike linked to a headlight that would grow brighter and brighter the more furiously I pedalled down Beacon Hill above our village. I would hit such a speed that, at night, I could floodlight the village below, turning night to day.

Talking of cycling, I read some time back that a group in Johannesburg was devising a plan to build cycleways through townships and they began campaigning for a National Cycling Day. Nothing came of it. Somebody said the title did not trip lightly enough off the tongue, but neither did the New England cry of “no taxation without representation” – yet look where it got the Americans.

Anything to encourage cycling is to be applauded (Clap! Clap! Clap! Thank you, madam) because cycling, unless you get run over by a 10-ton truck, is healthy and running costs are practically nil.

And talking of cycling and walking, it has been suggested that the best time to exercise is very early in the morning, before one’s brain realises what one is up to.

Annette Fraser (yet another reader) sent me a quote saying: “I prefer long walks. Especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.”