Over at Book Riot, Emily Poulson has a post in which her cat Sylvia reviews books. Here are three of the reviews:
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A couple made a complicated maze for their cat, and, amazingly, the cat found its way out with very little trouble. I count only 53 seconds! At the end you get to see a cat’s-eye view. You can find everything on the Internet!
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if you’re bored and have some empty cardboard toilet rolls (who doesn’t?), here are seven things you can make with them to amuse your cat.
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Lagniappe: this cat does look like a human, but I’m not convinced that it’s a real cat rather than a montage job. What do you think?
h/t: Su, Tom, Tim G.
Photoshopped
Wonderful! Thank you! Trevor Noah is proving himself every evening to be an incredibly wonderful person! ❣️
Love Trevor N. Can’t wait till he’s back on Monday explicating the last two weeks’ craziness.
It looks kind of like what you might get if you applied one of those face-swap filters to a person and a cat. Or maybe THIS is the cat that medieval artists used as a model for their awful paintings.
First thought that came to mind! 🙂
Toilet paper rolls lost me when he started using staples.
Ditto. My furry master destroys cardboard (and like playing with the empty rolls), but does a lot of chewing in the process– hunt, play, kill behaviour. He’d end up with a staple in his mouth or in his gut eventually.
Re: Human-faced cat. First thought: It’s Mike Myers. Second thought: Maybe Medieval cats really were this type. Third thought: It’s a fake.
This is the second cat we have that has a human face. There is no doubt now that medieval cats had human faces!
I thought it the least probable of our four hypotheses, but it actually turns out to probably be the right one!
🙂
On the human-faced cat. While all the photos show the cat head on, none of them show cat making the range of typical cat expressions that would have made it easier determine. And easier to spot a fake.
The maze-solving cat was cheating! It watched the construction!
More seriously, a more difficult maze has “islands”. I would have liked to have seen how an obviously smart cat would have dealt with those.
Yes, it was an easy maze. Most of the dead-ends were short and there were no loops for the cat to get stuck in. Still, I’m surprised the cat didn’t simply climb the cardboard sides to escape. Perhaps they had trained it with a set of simpler mazes, leading the cat to expect an easy escape.
Yes, it was barely a maze, with only a handful of dead ends, most of which the cat could see were dead ends before deciding to go in them. It didn’t really prove anything.
Sometimes I feel bad for being so cynical.
It’s a tough job but we’ve got to do it. Still, it was interesting to see the cat navigate the maze. I hope they take it farther. I would like to see how complicated the maze needs to be for the cat to get frustrated and, when it does, see what it does.
I’m not sure how much the watching construction would have helped. But at several points in the video you can see the cat looking up. To the ceiling. Which has orientation information from the position of light fittings, light from the window, etc. Plenty of information to help it find it’s way. Think of a cat on a forest floor and a bird’s nest in the branches of a tree and you’ll see that there’s strong selective benefit to good spatial understanding like this. What is more surprising is that so many humans have such abysmally little practice and confidence at such skills.
The second half is more like a cat’s-sternum view than a cat’s eye view. You can’t see when the eyes look up to the strange flat hoomin-house sky.
Of all the disturbing things that happen in The Grapes of Wrath, the turtle scene has always bugged me.
You did notice the tp hung just WRONG in the lifehards video, didn’t you?
Diana musta snuck in there🙀
Valkyrie the ‘human face’ Maine Coon is courtesy of a Russian cat profiteer [AKA breeder] Tatiana Rastorgueva [probably fake name]. All her cats look a bit ‘off’ & I suspect the faces have been photoshopped to change the proportions. HERE IS the instagram to compare her other cats
HERE IS the photographer Robert Sijka’s superior ‘mythical’ Maine Coon cat photo’s. He achieves this by lighting, background & a hairbrush [maybe scissors?]. He doesn’t admit to photoshop, but who knows?
Some are “offer” than others…Most pretty creepy.
I thought “not a cat lover” – it’s someone moving product
Yup
I don’t know. When you consider bizarre monstrosities like sphinx cats or bulldogs that have been achieved by breeding, I wouldn’t rule out that the fairly subtle changes in proportion evident in Rastorgueva’s cats could have been achieved by breeding.
cr
Thanks for the interesting link. Her photo montage suggests she’s actively trying to breed a Wookiee.
I conclude you & infinite are right unfortunately.
Well of course the cat could run the maze – he saw it being built and the plans were hanging right there . . .
Regarding bizarro cats – think they’ve been juxtaposed with wild cat faces – like lynxes.