That's the part of the article that stuck out to me. I mean, I used to have a lovely ginger cat who liked nothing more than to be vacuumed. I think that the author should ensure that his cat vacuuming experiments are more rigorous in future.

Well, my cat gets scared to death by a vacuum cleaner. She darts out of the room as soon as it's turned on.

Its the motor noise. Once the cat is 20 years old and totally deaf (depends on breed...), I can verify the cat will love the vacuum cleaner. It feels like being brushed and massaged at the same time. I'm surprised day spas don't do this to humans. Needless to say this is using the hose and brush attachment, not the carpet beater.

If the nozzle is too large, or the cat too skinny, it risks getting sucked into the machine. Fair enough the cat is scared. Cats don't do math either. Well, perhaps Schrödinger taught his cat, but I hear it had a sticky end. Nobody is really sure.

If they're so smart, why aren't they any better at bringing newcomers up to speed?

Some thing are hard no matter how you try to explain them. There's lots of stuff that seems to require working through it yourself to understand.

Oh, I don't disagree; some topics are inherently intractable. It's just that, in all my experiences, the numbers are more like 1 truly intractable topic for every thousand that some expert will mistakenly claim is intractable simply because they haven't put the effort into tracing out the connections to other topics.

The woman top row of this xkcd pretty much sums up my life:

http://xkcd.com/566/

Probably because it's hard to distill years of work connecting the dots (which at first don't appear to be connected in an obvious way) in a way that is easily digestable by somebody new to the field.

In any case, I imagine there's more glory in digging further into intellectual stuff than spending time making it palatable for newbies. :)

It's the newcomers' faults, clearly.