It always amuses me that large cats are no different than house cats, they seem to act exactly the same including sitting in boxes [1].
Only difference is when the large cat gets annoyed for unknown reasons it kills you rather than just scratching your arm up and that’s just due to a difference in size not behavior it seems.
I'm very sad I can't view the figures, which appear to include at least a couple of shots of cats sitting in things. It looks like the Kanizsa square illusion they're referring to is this: https://puzzlewocky.com/optical-illusions/kanizsa-square-and...
> for whatever reason the HTML link provides me with a "Download PDF" link even when in incognito.
That means that you likely use university/college internet and your institution has purchased institution access. This access is usually implemented in the form that everyone from the institution's network can download the paper, without having to log in at the publisher's website or anything. Basically an ip based whitelist.
I could believe that, if I were living on a college campus. But no, I'm using a residential ISP, and every geoip site I've checked in the past agrees re: my ISP.
I recall in the past when I was on a university connection, I was also greeted by some sort of affiliate banner indicating that I was getting access through the university.
Ken sold Ars to Conde Nast quite some time ago. I've not been active on the ars forums in years, but my understanding is Aurich runs the community these days, but does not have total decision making power over the biz side.
That has not been new for a while now. Arch was always some of the top reporting brass imo, what with having subscriptions since very early on.
But sometime 5-7 years ago when I ultimately stopped reading it, I distinctly remember a truly giant, fully scrolled and obnoxiously obtrusive ad for LG television that went and moved the page everywhere you scrolled. It was full of bright colors and strokes of lights going across the page and I remember it being in extreme contrast with the white-on-black plain text article.
It was then I realised that Ars, apart from slightly longer articles, is not much different that average publication. Then they launched their own 'video platform' which is what you are seeing promoted left and right.
Almost no website has full control or preapproval of the ads on it. They accept sales on an open platform and sometimes bad ads sneak on there. It's not even always possible to report them.
That one particular instance was memorable because it was very unlike any other ads on Ads before. I remember there was some official post later about 'new type of ads' but I fail to find it currently.
That particular incident was a result of explicit cooperation and not some random ad placement.
My cats do the same thing. Any novel surface will be sat on. Cardboard boxes (full or empty or collapsed) especially but their favorite seems to be clothes. I personally chose to believe it's because my clothes smell like me and they love me and I will not be accepting alternative explanations at this time.
Obfuscated Javascript didn't render here (Chromebook), found what looked like the abstract:
"A well-known phenomenon to cat owners is the tendency of their cats to sit in enclosed spaces such as boxes, laundry baskets, and even shape outlines taped on the floor. This investigative study asks whether domestic cats (<em>Felis silvestris catus</em>) are also susceptible to sitting in enclosures that are illusory in nature, utilizing cats’ attraction to box-like spaces to assess their perception of the Kanizsa square visual illusion. Carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study randomly assigned citizen science participants Booklets of six randomized, counterbalanced daily stimuli to print out, prepare, and place on the floor in pairs. Owners observed and videorecorded their cats’ behavior with the stimuli and reported findings from home over the course of the six daily trials. This study ultimately reached over 500 pet cats and cat owners, and of those, 30 completed all of the study’s trials. Of these, nine cat subjects selected at least one stimulus by sitting within the contours (illusory or otherwise) with all limbs for at least three seconds. This study revealed that cats selected the Kanizsa illusion just as often as the square and more often than the control, indicating that domestic cats may treat the subjective Kanizsa contours as they do real contours. Given the drawbacks of citizen science projects such as participant attrition, future research would benefit from replicating this study in controlled settings. To the best of our knowledge, this investigation is the first of its kind in three regards: a citizen science study of cat cognition; a formal examination into cats’ attraction to 2D rather than 3D enclosures; and study into cats’ susceptibility to illusory contours in an ecologically relevant paradigm. This study demonstrates the potential of more ecologically valid study of pet cats, and more broadly provides an interesting new perspective into cat visual perception research."
Thought that might be of interest to other who, like me, couldn't grok the headline.
94% of the participants did not complete all the assigned trials. That left 30 participants Who did, and among those, 9 cats were found to select " at least one stimulus by sitting within the contours (illusory or otherwise) with all limbs for at least three seconds."
So when they're saying this should be repeated in a controlled setting, they're not kidding. Why does a citizens scientist decide to not complete a study involving their cat? How about boredom, because their cat doesn't do anything?
It is completely possible that there was a strong bias.
With that said, all research has its limits. I think the authors have been very honest to discuss their findings and the limitation of the context - best case scenario someone takes the idea to the next level, worst case scenario we know it's a limited study and not conclusive.
I would be surprised if cats didn't do this, perceiving optical illusions just like we do. It's the sign of an advanced inference capable visual system. Otherwise, how could they be on alert for dangerous cucumbers in their territory for our amusement?
It's generally accepted that cats were useful for early humans because we hoarded grain, and so the cats were anti-rat machines. The anti-snake traits of kitties may be an older and just-as-useful reason we tolerated (and loved) cats than just protecting grain storage.
Curiously, I have a cat Brownie who grew up feral in the high sierras and appears to have subsisted on snakes as food/prey. They're still his favorite prey.
Instead of startling, Brownie the mighty snake hunter reacts to cucumbers as: FAVORITE FOOD.
He gets a cucumber almost every day. He hunts the cucumbers, drags them to his lair, and consumes them leaving only a small trail of seed viscera behind in his cave.
He's been doing this before I knew about cucumbers scaring cats on internet, and I think lends credence to the hypothesis that cucumbers trigger a "snake recognition circuit": a cat raised to see snakes as food rather (vs the inborn threat response) reacts to cucumbers as food!
Ha! Those recognition circuits are real. For us it was birds (quail). They were terrified of rolling balls -- basketballs, soccer balls, tennis balls, you name it, if they saw it roll they would make a special "emergency honk" and the entire group would freeze for the next minute. We had never seen that reaction before even though we raised them from eggs. They didn't ever do that as a reaction to people, they didn't do it in response to the neighborhood cat, and they didn't do it with explosions on TV (they quite liked those, actually). It was by far the strongest fear reaction we ever saw from them.
It took us a while to figure out why: it was probably a bird-of-prey detection circuit looking for gliding motion.
That cats have a natural snake recognition circuit is news to me. Several more anecdotes:
A feral cat that gave birth in a family member's garage in east San Diego (not the sierras but mountainous at ~3k ft elevation) found a rattle snake on their property one time. I had to scare her away several times while running around looking for a bucket and some long sticks because she did not recognize the danger at all. It looked more like she was approaching a strange new male cat that was about to court her than a venomous snake
Regarding the cucumbers: another family member had a cat in Europe in a village around 56°N - which is near the upper limit for snakes, so he's unlikely to have ever seen any, let alone eaten one - and the cat loved cucumbers. They had a greenhouse and had to be extremely vigilant after picking cucumbers because the second they'd turn their backs the cat would proceed to take nibbles out of every single one of them in turn, even if he was given one of his own. I think your cat just likes cucumbers.
Similarly have a lifelong memory of my cat when I was ~10 years old coming out of the woods with a 2-3ft snake sticking out of both ends of his mouth, proudly walking to the house with it.. and my mom screaming at him to put it down!
> "cat would proceed to take nibbles out of every single one of them in turn",
Interesting, although I suggest it much more likely that this cat also really is triggering some kind of "snake recognition circuit", it seems to be driven by some desire to make sure each cucumber is "dead". If it were only about liking cucumbers you would expect it to gobble down the nearest delicious thing it sees, which in my own observation of the felis catus, this is their default behavior when there is favored food and no danger present, they tend to act like greedy vultures, though it differs from cat to cat.
That's the problem: people are extrapolating species-wide behavior from a tiny sampling of an animal with high variability. Some feral sisters have set up shop on a family member's property and given birth to several litters so at this point I've got experience with two dozen cats over my lifetime. The natural variability in personality I've observed in three month old kittens raised in the same environment by two biological sisters (who themselves have vastly different personalities), is staggering. I have no freaking clue where people get most of their cat stereotypes.
> If it were only about liking cucumbers you would expect it to gobble down the nearest delicious thing it sees
Why? I can't imagine anyone in my family eating a cucumber after a cat has bitten it for sanitary reasons so I expect he quickly learned that the more cucumbers he nibbled on the more he got (these are home grown cucumbers, not the giant monstrosities in US supermarkets, so he'd want more than one).
For memetic reasons I immediately wondered if the same cognitive apparatus might be repurposed to identify hotdogs. No doubt specific areas of the brain are electrically involved, and monitorable via electrodes or more invasive probes. This suggests an opportunity to bring to market an efficient, self-cleaning, content filter engine employing a redundant array of cats; then further observe that caudal repositioning is an output property
of tensor cats, making such an array the perfect vehicle to unlock the broader field of Feline Learning, with obvious opportunities for tail optimisation at runtime
and dinner time.
It's not that cats are scared of cucumbers. It's that the cucumber is secretly placed close behind them while they're eating and vulnerable. It's like startling a person by sneaking up on them. That doesn't mean they're scared of you. They're just surprised.
>In Africa, most of the storks ate snakes; including really deadly ones. They would stomp them to death.
my pet goose does this as well with anything remotely snake-shaped.
She's used to it now, but she used to do the same hopping-dance every time she'd encounter a garden hose.
hop hop hop with her wings out to appear bigger while quickly snapping at the 'victim' with her beak and then darting to caution with her head while keeping her distance from it otherwise and continuing the stomp dance.
must just be a bird thing (the dance, not the anti-snake behavior), I have my doubts that her soft webbed-feet would do anything but perhaps scare an actual snake.
Our cat, who had never seen a real snake, was hunting "snakes" - my hand in cobra position or rubber/plastic toy snakes - in very distinctive "mongoose" like style - cautiously moving around and ultimately making a lighning fast jump just a bit from a side and biting the "snake" right below the "head". When it were a "standing cobra" - my hand wrapped in several layers of cloth for protection - the bite would be right below the palm, a very strong bite with the cat simultaneously wrestling my hand to the ground using his whole body.
We "hoarded" grain because we transitioned from hunter-gatherers to an agro lifestyle in order to brew beer from that grain, so cats and beer are natural allies.
Ships and distilleries also used cats to keep rodents at bay. The Glenturret distillery in Scotland even commissioned a statue of their cat Towser after her passing.
It's not a statement that should be taken any more seriously than a flippant quip in informal conversation.
The story of humans adopting farming is complex, happened multiple times in multiple places, and different societies had very different priorities, methods, and environments to work within. In that context, saying we all did it to get drunk is a bit nonsense.
One of the more interesting things you can read about is how we've found some neolithic settlements that practiced farming for a few centuries, before returning to nomadic hunter gatherer status.
It's pretty clear the primary motivation was simply maintaining caloric intake in changing habitats, not specifically brewing bear, though the Sumarians were quite into that. In fact the oldest remains of what we might call "beer" that have been found were essentially naturally fermented porridge: very thick in consistency. So it seems pretty clear the porridge came first, at least in the Levant.
You know, this is something people mention a lot on the internet since forever, and it reminds me of the assumption that mouthwash which is 20-25% alcohol must be for the purpose of killing germs.
However, I recently read something that claimed to debunk this, saying that even 50 proof is not effective at all at sterilizing things and it is merely a solvent for the active ingredients.
The reason I stumbled on it was because I'd been worrying about whether the alcohol free variants are effective, vs. alcohol potentially being a carcinogen.
So I think it's less obvious what effect 1% alcohol has than at first glance.
I did consider not posting that factoid. I had been a while since I double checked it. You're right, now that I think about it more. I'm inclined to no longer believe that statement to be true but I wonder if a single digit percentage of alcohol could be enough to stave off more advanced stages of exponential growth of bacteria for a meaningful amount of time like, say, a day.
It was debunked time and time again. People in ancient times drank water, it's just that reading ancient texts gave some historians the idea that people only drank beer, since that was the only drink they wrote about(well, along with wine). No one wrote about drinking water because there was no reason to write about it. But modern historians are very much certain that the "they only drank beer because it was safer" thing is a myth, we don't have any proof for that.
Ya, have a cat who took on 2 copperheads at once with great delight. I won't say I rescued him but I did get him out of there with some blood loss (mine). Maybe a study on the cat - mongoose correlation?
Lucky for your cat, headphones no longer need wires. In fact, I think Apple should include that in their marketing. "Not only have we reduced our packaging, we've also stop scaring your cats!"
Nice, they got volunteers to print out patterns and use them to see if/how often their cats sat in them. Great use of cat owners! And, also, probably a shoe-in for the Ig Nobel awards :-p
Sci-Hub is defending itself in the Indian High Court, and the case is still being heard. The court asked it to stop uploading new materials in the interim[0], and they seem to be honoring it to avoid contempt of court I guess.
Because Sci-Hub is defending this case in court (unlike in some other cases where they ignored proceedings), so ignoring the court order to pause adding new papers would hurt their chances of winning.
I'm flabergasted that they recevie so few completed studies. I thought asking people to take pictures of their cat would be like "duh, I do that anyways" level of easy.
Another observation after reading the article again, reminds me of the explanation for vampires unable to stand crucifixes in Peter Watt's Blindsight:
"a cross-wiring of normally-distinct receptor arrays in the visual cortex, resulting in grand mal-like feedback seizures whenever the arrays processing vertical and horizontal stimuli fired simultaneously across a sufficiently large arc of the visual field. Since intersecting right angles are virtually nonexistent in nature, natural selection did not weed out the Glitch until H. sapiens sapiens developed Euclidean architecture; by then, the trait had become fixed across H. sapiens vampiris via genetic drift, and – suddenly denied access to its prey – the entire subspecies went extinct shortly after the dawn of recorded history."
The paper starts with "cats have been observed to do this thing, which we will take advantage of for an experiment on how cats perceive the world."
The actual test is whether cats perceive a certain type of visual illusion. The test is whether cats will sit inside such an illusory shape in the same way they do non-illusory shapes. The result is that they do, indicating that cats process visual stimuli in a way at least somewhat similar to humans.
tl;dr You should at least read the whole abstract before assuming you understand it.
Please don't respond with swipes or provocations, even when another commenter is wrong or you feel they are. It's easy to see how that last bit would end up taking the thread to a worse state, and your comment would be just fine without it.
Yeah, I was grumpy. I took a nap and came back 6 hours later and went "that wasn't fair, I should remove that last line"... But the option to edit was gone.
Please don't escalate like this, even when another commenter reacted badly or you feel they did. It may not feel like you owe them better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. The ecosystem is fragile here.
Fortunately your comment history is otherwise pretty good, so this should be easy to fix.
Only difference is when the large cat gets annoyed for unknown reasons it kills you rather than just scratching your arm up and that’s just due to a difference in size not behavior it seems.
1. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/404268504021009708/