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Lifting a Cat


prettybird

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As you would know if you have a kitten, they only get worse as they age. This is intensely true for my kitten, Mia. Not only does she constantly escape her room, but she has figured out that my computer screen is touch screen, and wreaks havoc on whatever I am doing on the internet by touching it. 

I often have to pick her up to try to prevent her from destroying something. She only weighs two pounds, even though she is 13-14 weeks old. I don't have to do much work because of her size, but there is still some being done. 2 pounds equals about .91 kilograms when converted. T-mg = ma would be the equation used to see how much tension is needed to lift her, however there is a flaw in using this equation, which I will discuss later. When I plug in the values, assuming I'm lifting her at a constant speed, the tension would need to be 19.6 newtons in my arm or 9.8 in each of my arms. (Back to the kittens being bad, as I wrote this exact sentence she climbed into my McDonalds bag and started licking my french fries. Kittens are like babies but they move faster and can't really be contained.) 

But its unlikely I lift her at a constant speed, so lets say I lift her at an acceleration of 1.7 m/s2, just to change it up a bit. Then, when plugging the values in, the tension in one arm would have to be 23 N or 11.5 N in each arm. 

Back to the problem with this equation. It assumes that the mass of the string (or arm in this case) is negligible, which obviously isn't true since my arms do have mass. This means that my values are off, but this is a high school blog so lets just forget about it for now and pretend my arms don't have mass. Alright, now that that's taken care of, have a nice day!

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