hckrnws
> While dogs slowed down and hesitated before they attempted to use an uncomfortably small opening, in the case of cats, we did not detect this change in their behavior before their attempt to go through even the narrowest openings. However, remarkably, cats showed hesitation both before they attempted to penetrate the shortest openings, and while they moved through it.
I just skimmed, but I didn’t see any mention whiskers. It’s seems to me that cats can make highly precise measurements of width just by sticking their heads in a space, but height judgments requires additional consideration.
> Cats are also aided by their large and sensitive vibrissae, which are positioned on such locations of their head that the cat can detect nearby obstacles in closer encounters. Vibrissal sensation can compensate for the somewhat weaker vision in cats from closer distances or in poorly illuminated environments. Therefore, it is possible that cats approached the narrow openings in our experiment without differential hesitation, and they could use their vibrissae to assess the suitability of the apertures before penetrating them.
Oh thank you! I’m just a lowly cat owner and did not know what vibrissae are.
If you have ever put a cone on a cat (which lasts about five minutes), you see they get crazy. They hug the walls.
Their whiskers are a major factor in their perception.
I think they can also dislocate their spine.
My cat likes to sit in what we call his "Buddha" position, with his back bent about 90 degrees, and his paws in front. This seems to be a common position. He'll sit like that for an hour.
I think the cones must also screw up their aural spatial sensation (changing their perception of sound from fairly omni-directional, to seeming like all the sounds are coming from in front of the cone).
My cats are weird and loved their cones after they got neutered. One would stick his head back in the cone after I took it off.
I think all cats are weird in their own way. Our cat often sunbathed in the middle of parking space across the road. We occasionally had to go out to fetch him because he would refuse to move when someone started to drive into the space.
I have a ginger tomboy who does exactly this. He loves just rolling around in the fine layer of dirt while keeping an eye out for birds or frogs
Orange cats sharing their one brain cell.
I think mine goes to the bathroom, when it's his turn with it...
I've seen a few people use a soft inflatable or plush collar that's more flat, and doesn't go up around the face, instead of an actual cone. That way the cat's the whiskers aren't disturbed while still preventing the cat from worsening wounds by licking. At least some cats seem to be a lot more tolerant of that style.
I tried this but cats, being (almost) liquid, can very easily wrap around the soft collars and reach pretty much any part of their body.
From skimming the HN comments:
> Wiskers are mentioned, but using the scientific name - vibrissae
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Calvin vindicated
I love C&H and am blown away there was something so applicable. Felt like an XKCD moment!
C&H moments are the original XKCD moments!
Bill Watterson was absolutely brilliant at depicting the weird positions that cats will lie in.
Lol I automatically read C&H as Cyanide and Happiness
My cat woke up, did a big stretch, and yawned. Then she hiccoughed, turned into a small dragon, and coughed up a fireball.
"!!!" I said.
"What?" She shrugged back into cat form.
"You're a shape shifter?"
"All cats are. There's just never any reason to not be a cat."
Missing a cite to some pioneering work on this in the 30s by A.S.J. Tessimond [1]
Cats no less liquid than their shadows
Offer no angles to the wind.
They slip, diminished, neat through loopholes
Less than themselves; will not be pinned
Not to mention Fardin, 2014.
Before I had cats, I used to think of them in terms of other animals. What I mean is that a dog or a horse is very defined by its skeletal structure. They are like popsicle stick armatures with some flesh thrown on.
Now I think of cats more like amorphous blobs with some hard bits stuck on. I think anyone who owns a cat will know what I mean by this.
My cat often lays down twisted 180 degrees or more. Just doing whatever they want, defying laws of nature.
Well, dogs also do this—I present to you my majestically twisted creature: https://imgur.com/a/5WcYzSw
I have no clue how that is even possible.
I'm also stupefied by a human doing it. https://imgur.com/a/W7bcLZo
Taken from: https://www.gq.com/story/aleksei-goloborodko-real-life-diet
Yeah, nope. If I get like that, I'm never coming back. Probably have to bury me in that pose.
Is this really just a matter of stretching? I read the article and he sums it down to he needs to stretch every day (he said himself thst his diet doesn't matter too much) He was also in the circus since 4, but this doesn't seems like something I could do in a lifetime of practice.
You probably couldn't. There are lots of forms of hyper mobility, and extreme versions come with health risks. With practice and training you can probably do a lot more than you imagine, but for most of us the whole "fold yourself in half backwards" thing is beyond the limits of our spine, and it's for the best.
Brought memories of one of my cats (now silent meow) who also added the Italian equivalent of a middle finger.
Your dog is the inverse of the Firefox.
My Shiba Inu does all kinds of similar things. He also doesn't hesitate at all when trying narrow spaces. He only hesitates once he's all the way in and realize he can't go any further nor turn around so he has to back up completely back out.
I almost sprayed all my tea to my monitor and keyboard.
Wish both of you a happy and derpy life together.
majestic indeed!
Clearly your dog has been possessed by a demon.
Dog Yoga
Doga.
When I pick up my cat and he's relaxed, it feels like I'm picking up a tube sock full of pudding.
Horse is practically all air. That's their secret. They are blimps with legs.
For what it's worth, their hips and shoulders are actually limited in range of motion compared to humans, due to the very high muscle attachment points that are also what make them so amazingly strong and explosive for their small size. But an extremely flexible spine combined with the ability to dislocate key joints means they can still fit into very small, narrow spaces, presumably an adaptation allowing them to hunt small rodents that burrow and hide out in underground dens. Which I assume is why they have the instinct to immediately jump into and check out any box or cabinet or other enclosed space you open. You never know if there might be some voles in there.
They actually prefer to jump in a box because to them, it's a safe space to hide and watch. Cats look for spaces like that because their wild ancestors (and feral cats now) are small enough that they are both predators and prey.
Yup. Same reason why they like to climb to high places. They can feel safe and survey the surroundings. Additionally, cats will hide in confined spaces when ill or in pain; a sudden desire to hide for prolonged periods is a sign that it needs to see a vet.
I think a lot of oddities we attribute to cats can be explained by the fact that they are both predator and prey. No other animal we spend a lot of time with occupies such a schizophrenic position in the food chain.
I've noticed free-range chickens have some characteristics that derive from a similar position; chickens are not "predators" but they will happily predate if the opportunity arises, and they are also prey. Being birds and natural flock animals, it manifests differently, and there's some interesting behaviors I've noticed.
"Chicken" as a synonym for "total, utter coward" is slander. Yes, running is their first play, but they do not just roll over and die like a sheep or a rabbit; if running isn't working they can and do fight back for all they are worth. And they don't have to be "backed into a corner" and only fight if it's the absolute last option, it just has to be as I phrased it: "running isn't working".
We owned a small chicken that roamed in our garden, but not long after we got that chicken our neighbors got a cat.
We were worried their cat would attack our chicken at some point, until one day we saw their cat running for its life while a small chicken chases after it trying to keep up with the agile predator using its tiny chicken legs.
From that day forward the neighbor's cat understood its place in the pecking order.
A rooster in full on attack mode can be pretty scary.
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> actually
I spit my coffee out
> You never know if there might be some voles in there
I like to think I always know if there might be some voles in my boxes and cabinets.
That's just what the voles want you to think.
A stray cat I adopted as we could not find his owner was named "Beanbag" (transitioning to "Mr Bean", no reference to the comedian)for exactly this quality.
After a few days of recovery and starting to get comfortable, he started to snooze and literally poured off the couch, like a bag of beans... and he loved to stretch in my lap while I coded, putting up with all the typing & mousing... Truly liquid, indeed! Wonderful little guy, I still miss him.
I, for one, know, understand and welcome our almost liquid feline overlords.
Purring bags of mostly water.
These are old news for those of us that grew bonsai kittens in the late 90s.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050203111131/http://bonsaikitt...
Obviously it was a hoax, probably one of the first ones reaching the first generation of internet users. But lots of people fell for it.
Oh but that is old news!
"On the Rheology of Cats":
https://www.drgoulu.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Rheology-...
Now that is what a dry academic paper about cats is supposed to look like. Cat pictures on every page.
> If the opportunity was given to them, dogs opted for a detour in the case of uncomfortably small apertures
Except in the case of one very sweet but not exactly brilliant large dog I know that legitimately believes his entire body is just the tip of his nose that he can see. I’ve seen him walk straight through a 2” hole in a screen door, and he will repeatedly try to sit on e.g. a chair armrest and not understand why it doesn’t work.
Having 7 cats, they are all different. My oldest mail holds himself rigid. The youngest male - still a kitten - is a noodle of murder and destruction.
Nice Description. A black noodle just joined our other 5 cats.
Black cats are the best. She is one of two sisters (oldest cats at 9 at this point). 17 pounds of chunk loving. Annoying as all get out, but will literally roll around on the arm of the couch and “accidentally” drop into my lap.
My wife and I go between two locations, today will be the first time 4 of the cats meet the murder noodle.
> their free-floating, diminutive collarbones allow them to squeeze themselves through very narrow gaps.
Detached collarbones is one of the many interesting things I know about cats because of my cat obsessed kid!
Interesting because I have recently been trying to catch a stray cat for a capture-release process and the cat will not walk into a typical trap-door type wire mesh trap. Watching him on video the roof of the trap seems to freak him out. It seems a better trap would have a narrow gap with high door that lets them confidently walk into the trap and trigger would just block the slot perhaps with some sort of sliding door blocking the exit.
The overhead view of figure 3 in particular is noteworthy to me. The 3 human subjects are represented as abstract ovals, and the cat drawn as a cat who is staring up as if to look through the fourth ceiling at the reader.
The reader becomes, in a sense, a greeble.
This paper would have been a fun project for a scientific illustrator.
For reference, in the cat realm a greeble is what cats are looking at when they stare up at the ceiling or wall and there is nothing there. At least that you can see.
So instead of the real cat staring at the imaginary greeble, we the reader are the real greeble staring at the imaginary cat. Who is staring back because it can see us.
There's no mention of their whiskers, I was under the impression that this is what they use to become aware of their body size in tight spaces.
Wiskers are mentioned, but using the scientific name - vibrissae
When a cat can go between two openings that are too small for the cat to pass through and the cat isn't being observed is what's interesting though and nobody has yet explained that.
I watched as a cat dove through a narrow opening (stair baulsters)only to wedge its aft end,stop dead,do a totaly ignoble face plant,and then sort of oooze through to land gracelessly. So in this case there was no hesitation,and cats regularly missjudge and get run over by cars,so at best the data is just that...data.
This seems relevant: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lastquarte...
This science paper could have been a cat meme video. Never thought I would be saying that and meaning it literally.
I mean I’ve seen the cat challenge meme video done a dozen times.
https://youtu.be/O7PkYkXdKwc?si=-8BTPVvAK19WVEF
This is like “hey what if this cat video was a research paper”
Obligatory Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/catsareliquid/.
This sounds like something Karl Pilkington would come up with.
We need a documentary.
I wonder if the same experiment could be done with big cats - Would an opening that touches the mane of a lion have the same results?
The cat will just get annoyed - it's a shaggy tangly thing that always gets in the way.
Speaking from personal experience >:3
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Anecdotally my cat is always very cautious before going through cat flags, which are not particularly narrow but very short, but never hesitate to run into narrow but deep stuff...
This is why they flow out of our grasp.
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The early networks that evolved into the modern Internet were mostly paid for with public funds, and they’re used nowadays mostly to watch cat videos. I don’t see anyone complaining about that /)
I complain about it frequently, actually, in context of commercial use and the "commons" the Internet is founded on.
These things also don't compare.
Complaining about commercial use is not the same as complaining about the cat videos.
Comparing the advent of the internet with a study on the flexibility and agility of cats in tight spaces isn't exactly apples to apples.
no, it might lead to better surgery robots, search and rescue robots, and countless things that I'm not even capable of imagining.
you are the one comparing apples to oranges - the internet has been around for 50 years and has shown its value - this one has just been published!
> no, it might lead to better surgery robots, search and rescue robots,
No, that's extremely optimistic, at best. We've learned that cats seem to use their knowledge of their height but not width when choosing to go (or not) through a hole.
That's it. We're promised follow-up research because it might be that, other than height, they also know and use their additional characteristics, like weight.
That's all. Are you seriously suggesting this knowledge might be helpful in building "surgery robots"?
> and countless things that I'm not even capable of imagining.
Maybe. Are the chances of that enough to justify the expense? Couldn't this work be done more cost-effectively (it's about cats - the world is filled with guys who would do all the experiments for free, given instructions, just for their cat(s) to be in a scientific study...)? Especially since we're talking about Hungary, which is not a super-rich nation.
In any case, allocating funds for research is probably a very hard problem, and I know nothing about it. Still, questioning the expenses is something any taxpayer should be able to do. Just give me good reasons why it had to cost $120k to feed 30 cats for a few weeks, and I'll be happily on my way.
have you tried asking them? researchers are often happy to explain their work!
What I'm trying to call out is that not all studies are equally valuable nor should they all be publicly funded. Would you at least agree me on that?
But how can you know ahead of time which studies are valuable and which are less so? What about metastudies? How do you quantify their worth?
Those are great questions worthy of debate. But we shouldn't just give up on those hard questions and say that all research is worthy of public funding should we?
Eh. It's not like research funding is unlimited. Institutions get a budget and they spend it on research projects how they see fit.
public funds are allocated by multiple experts in various fields checking applications are in line with government policy. if you think you can do better, I'd encourage you to run for election and set different policies. from what I can see, the system is working as intended.
HN literally posted a video on how broken the public funding system is (in Physics) days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41808127
This broken system doesn't just stop at Physics. If you watch the video, she does a great job at explaining what exactly is broken.
I'd love you to watch that video and then come back and explain to me why she is wrong and why the system is actually working well and as-intended.
I've seen the video - to be fair, theoretical physics is probably the cheapest thing to fund - they just need a supply of chalk. ultimately a lot of physics is a jobs program to keep physicists from going abroad and working on a foreign nuclear program.
seriously though, you should run for election on this platform!
NKFIH, grant # K143077 is not for this study specifically, searching for it reveals a number of studies the same grant supported, such as:
https://figshare.com/articles/media/You_talkin_to_me_Functio...
and
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632072...
That's right. This study falls under the parent grant entitled:
> Péter Pongrácz: The human as a limited resource - a new paradigm to understand social behavior in dogs (Eötvös Loránd University)
When asking these kinds of questions, I always remind myself "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge" [0].
On the other hand, I believe that researching how animals think, behave and "work" in general, is a very important part of being human. They're alive, too, and they defy tons of prejudice we have about them over and over. We need to revise tons of knowledge about animals and other living things, in general.
[0]: https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/library/UsefulnessHa...
So what exactly is your criteria for when a study should or should not be publicly funded?
Good question.
I think if there's a large corpus of research supporting a hypothesis, any research retrying that hypothesis in an insignificant way can be disqualified from funding. If you challenge the hypothesis, or adding something significant to the dark areas of that hypothesis, you could be funded.
Moreover, if your research fails to prove that hypothesis, or proves the exact opposite, that should be also printed/published somewhere, because failing is equally important in science.
In short, tell us something we don't know in a provable way. That's it. This is what science is.
This is what I think with about your question with my Sysadmin/Researcher/Ph.D. hats combined.
Thanks for your kind response! Are you familiar with the Replication Crisis? What happens when most of the "hypothesis" being challenged can't be rightly replicated in the first place?
And what happens when the primary means of funding is attached the volume of papers and not the quality or impact, as is what I believe to be the case generally here in the US?
Hey, no problem. Yes, I'm familiar with it, and I work in/with projects which aims to create reproducible research (Galaxy, Zenodo, etc.). If you tell me that "I can make this unreproducible paper reproducible, but with a different process (or the same one), and share all the pipeline from dust to result", I'll tell you to go for it, and fund you.
At the end, if something is not reproducible, and you're testing reproducibility of that thing, it's illuminating a dark area of that hypothesis.
Measuring the quality of the research and its impact is not something I'm very familiar with to be honest, and I'm not from US, so I can't tell how universities push their people, however publish or perish is a real problem everywhere in the world.
We used to see citation numbers important, then cite-rings cropped up. We valued paper counts, then professors started to lend their names to papers in their areas for "free" advisory. Now we have more complex algorithms/methods, and now I'm more of a research institute person than an academic, and I don't know how effective these things are anymore.
But hey, I do research for fun and write papers now and then. Just to keep myself entertained to find reasons to learn something new.
Fair enough and all great points. I think we're more aligned than not on the fundamentals here. Folks seem to be reacting negatively to my even propositioning these questions without even having made a judgment on the merit of the study myself.
Yes, we agree in the fundamentals. The reality is, academia dynamics is very different w.r.t. to private sector, esp. startups. So, knowing how research works in academia is a bit of an unknown for people who're not interested in this line of work, or people who doesn't know how these things are done in general.
In short, the value proposition for a piece of research is very different depending on the lens you're looking through to that research.
Why are you asking us? I'm not a research scientist/funding expert. There are people whose job it is to decide that, and they decided it was. I trust them to do their jobs, just like they trust me to do my job when they need my services.
Why do you trust these people when for the most part, they are unelected bureaucrats serving their own self-interests?
Because it's not like that everywhere in the world. For example, here, to be able to get funding, you need to pass a panel interview of researchers who are experienced in the area of your research. Our system employs "hordes of research experts" to shake down most inadequate ones, and push the rest to the actual researchers to further filter them.
IIRC, many if not most EU countries employ similar methods.
> they are unelected bureaucrats serving their own self-interests
You seem to be pushing an agenda, not asking questions in good faith.
My agenda is that I think it's completely rationale to ask about the merits of publicly funded research and debate that topic. You may not like that question or my responses, but that is my assertion here.
> completely rational to ask about the merits of publicly funded research
Sure, but asking asking non-experts on some web forum to make guesses at the answers, and insulting the people whose job it is to do this work based on your assumptions of how it works, is a bad way to go about answering that question.
I was rooting against you in this exchange until you said this , because I took your initial plea for authority to be a cop out from joshmcginnis's argument, because I'm a human and have biases and sometimes put the quality of "earnestness" behind my beliefs above others' (i.e., whether I agree with them or not, my counterpart is equally sincere in what they believe in as me). That disposition is unwise and I think my realization of this underpins what I found striking about the comment that you just made.
In a way, I think this is what joshmcginnis is guilty of here...but I want to believe that he's aware that he's being provocative, but being provocative is the entire point. Your initial response of deference and the overall response that his comments are receiving from others are decent representations of how the mere questioning of certain institutions (online, pseudonymously, through relatively obscure channels) can be seen as problematic.
It is something like social science as performance art. Or the other way around?
There's an extremely annoying pattern you see a lot, where someone with a naive understanding of an extremely complicated topic will bust in and say "you are all idiots who are obviously doing it wrong!" without having any understanding of the deep, complex history of the topic. They think they know better than the experts, because they found what looks like an obvious, surface-level problem. After all, why haven't those idiots noticed this problem and fixed it??
If they're lucky, someone who actually knows what they're talking about will walk them through how it's actually a very complex topic, and what looked like an obvious problem is actually just a visible imperfect outcome of what is the best way we've managed to optimize the problem space. Others in this thread are taking this approach. Bless 'em.
But, I think it would be better if people didn't do this in the first place. Research funding is a super complicated topic involving hundreds of people and processes. No, it's not perfect, but it's the best approach we've got. If you want to improve a complex system, you need to go engage with it, understand how it works, understand how the problem occurred (if it even is a problem!), and find a way to fix it without making things worse. This is really hard work! Just busting into a topic and loudly complaining on some random web forum doesn't accomplish anything, except if you're lucky making someone else spoon-feed you the answers you could've found yourself.
Usually it's just ignorance, but sometimes it's more sinister, as it is also a useful approach for pushing an agenda to other non-expert readers. "Look how much money we waste on public science funding! We should reduce that funding. Look at these corrupt self-serving bureaucrats! We should put someone else in charge, and I know just who it should be." Hmm...
I agree with you in principle and I wouldn't want to allege the entirety of what you've said to joshuamcginnis's approach or motives. But I agree with you in principle.
I can also see how any perceived conflict in the top-down relationship between authoritative institutions and the general population can frustrate a person (i.e., a member of the general populace), especially when the institutions are portrayed as vague identities ("the experts") and the complexities that they operate under are a part of a broader network of institutions and entities that themselves seem to thrive under incongruence with respect to the said top-down relationship.
So to draw attention to an issue in a frustrating matter, can be seen as a natural human response. At times it may even be necessary. If not, then we reach a point where we wind up denying of their natural inclination to be frustrated with what they perceive to be (and quite often) an injustice to society, irrespective of class distinctions. And a person does not necessarily need to be an "expert" to point or argue against that.
Not everyone is willing to resign themselves to "it's the best we've got", if that's not what they believe and resignation, or willful engagement with a system perceived to be corrupt, is tantamount to affirming the system itself, which is unimaginable and even more frustrating (read: insanity-inducing).
I say all of this, assuming good faith and not from the perspective of ill intent or ignorance that you've presented (which again, I agree with in principle).
Pardon the commas.
This whole thread started because you implied this study was worthless. Would be interested to hear your criteria.
It's entirely rational and reasonable for someone to at least ask and receive a decent response to the question, "Why should my tax dollars have been used to funded this research?" Academia should have great responses lined up which garner continued support from the public.
But the fact that we aren't even allowed to ask questions without immediately being shut down as dissenters of all publicly funded research is problematic.
Public research should absolutely be at least partially evaluated by the very people funding it to begin with.
Hungarians aren’t brutish optimizers who cut costs and strive for uniformity and blandness; they are not like those philistines that know the cost of everything but the value of nothing. Or else they wouldn’t speak Hungarian.
Even better that it got published in Cell.
Wait until you learn about something called "the military"
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FYI, the cats are not literally almost liquid in body composition.
"Almost" is a bit vague and probably too strong, but they are mostly water, just like other mammals.
Therefore they are more properly classified as soups.
Noted ontologist Pirate Software would argue that cats are a Wellington, not a soup.
I can't refute his logic.
I'm surprised to see this guy show up in a positive light after his false flagging campaign.
What false flagging campaign are you referring to? I am not familiar.
He's taken down at least a dozen videos criticizing him by using his position as a youtuber with a million+ subscribers. Originally it was just videos referencing his "maldavius figtree" fursona, but now it's anything that portrays him in a negative way.
Save for their skeletons and other dry structures like hair and shells, animals are in fact gels.
Maybe they're more broth-like? Also the paper at https://www.drgoulu.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Rheology-... seems to indicate that they are "active rheological materials" and therefore probably non-Newtonian.
That's a lot of ambiguity for a scientific paper. Even if it's true (Cats are about 60-70% water), that's not the point of the title.
I suspect its because it makes for a catchy headline.
Catchy headline, but also in a fluid in a dynamical sense - cats "flow" into spaces when exploring by trial-and-error testing openings with their body size, but they are also only "almost" liquid in that for especially narrow openings they are reluctant to poke their heads in, presumably because they might get stuck.
The contrast with dogs in the introduction is instructive: dogs tend to hunt over open fields rather than chasing prey into narrow dens, so it makes sense they would tend to make conservative eyeball judgments about whether they can fit into certain spaces. But cats will try to corner their prey in a tunnel/etc, so they have good reason to rely more on touch and experimentation ("ecologically-valid strategy").
I agree. I think it's a bit of nod into the playfulness most associate with cats. I don't mind though, cats are one subject I'm okay with some leeway in the rigorousness of the article title.
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Here's the podcast: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/52350e74-f4b0-42d9-a1...
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