![]() ![]() "Defendants are accused of shamelessly using identifying 'Nyan Cat' and 'Keyboard Cat' by name to promote and market their games. "Plaintiffs accuse Warner Bros and 5th Cell of including, without any licenses or authorizations, the Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat characters in their original Scribblenauts videogame released in 2009, the 2010 Super Scribblenauts, 2011 Scribblenauts Remix, and the 2012 Scribblenauts Unlimited." Kotaku dug up the lawsuit, which alleges the following instances of trademark infringement against Keyboard Cat rights holder Charles Schmidt and Nyan Cat owner Christopher Orlando Torres: Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Internet. So then, who are 5th Cell's mighty legal foes? Why, none other than the folks who created Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat. But it didn't come from Rick Astley, Barack Obama, or even a wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube man. So naturally, it's finally happened: a lawsuit. No, it's never applied names (or any proper nouns at all) to its homages, but some of the candy coated likenesses are uncanny. And yet, even before DC license announcements entered the picture, I was always impressed by how carefully the series balanced on the glossy lip of pop culture without falling into a bottomless well of legal troubles. So if you hear this song, for the love of science, get out of the way.Here at RPS, we make a policy of loving Scribblenauts in spite of its flaws, and sometimes we use it to construct elaborate, oddly poignant superhero parodies. As cute as it is, a housecat-sized Pop-Tart creature moving at Mach 7 has eight times the kinetic energy as a two-ton car moving at highway speed. Discovering Pop-Tart cat rainbow farts that contain over eight mega-joules of energy could win the next (Ig) Nobel Prize. Therefore, the cat’s rainbow must provide the remainder. Given the mass of the meme and how fast an object has to go to escape the pull of the Moon, Nyan Cat would need 166 times more energy than is held within the calories of its tart-body to get back to cruising the cosmos. ![]() And if an average housecat is about three kilograms, all the energy contained within Nyan Cat’s strawberry pastry body could only get the kitten up to about three-quarters the velocity of a cruising 747-almost 500 miles per hour (based on kinetic energy alone). That sounds like a lot, but you can get that many Joules from burning just a gram of coal. But could the furry/delicious abomination actually produce such thrust? Where would it get the energy to do so? (C'mon, you've come with me this far already.) According to some of the oddest calculations I’ve ever seen, a strawberry Pop-Tart the size of a housecat contains about 51,000 Joules of energy. That's about 0.1% of the thrust of just one Boeing 747 engine, but then again the delicious feline doesn't weigh 900,000 pounds. If that were the case, Nyan Cat's rainbow magically generates around 300 Newtons of thrust. Nyan Cat's rainbow could have a thrust-to-weight ratio of 10-to-1. ![]() If the critter can outperform the jet, it would also outperform its engines. The escape velocity of the Moon-and therefore Nyan Cat's velocity in my feline fantasy-is twice as fast as our fastest jet the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. That little cat is indeed excreting a hypersonic rainbow out its backside. For the Moon, this turns about to be about 2,375 meters per second-or around seven times the speed of sound in air. This critical speed is dependent on the mass and size of the object producing the pull, as well as a defined gravitational constant. Like how rockets on Earth must do, Nyan Cat would have to reach the escape velocity of the Moon. And what better place to take off and land from than the giant litter box that is the undisturbed regolith of the Moon? If Nyan Cat landed on the Moon to do its business, the strawberry-flavored critter would eventually have to get off the surface-it would have to escape the Moon’s gravitational pull. That’s because this cosmic cat, this ubiquitous meme, has to take off and land adorably in space. An 8-bit Pop-Tart kitty moves twice as fast as the fastest jet ever created. ![]()
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