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A little catty
Feedback’s felines are often nowhere to be seen. For hours at a time – in the case of the more free-range cat, sometimes several days – they vanish from sight. What might they be doing? Torturing the local small-animal population perhaps, or chasing fallen leaves around the yard, or visiting the local school to cause as much disruption to learning as possible, or perhaps just lazing in a warm spot to sleep. But who knows?
One person who does know is Michelle Smit at Massey University in New Zealand, because she and her colleagues put collar-mounted accelerometers on cats to follow their movements. Feedback learned of this from the UK’s newspaper, which reported the study from the journal on 12 September under the heading “Paws for thought: Science proves your cat really is that lazy”.
Smit’s team tracked 10 indoor pet cats and 18 free-roaming pets, as well as eight cats living semi-outdoors in research facilities. Their behaviours were grouped into eight categories: “active (walking and trotting), eating, grooming, littering, lying, scratching, sitting, and standing”. Presumably the data was insufficiently granular to capture other cat behaviours such as “pushing breakable objects off furniture onto hard floors” and “inexplicably hissing at one’s human after having previously been pleased with a cuddle”.
The most mobile cats were free-roaming pets: in summer, they were active a full 3.9 per cent of the time, though this fell to 2.7 per cent in winter. The indoor and research cats spent even less active time. Littering and scratching took up very little time, less than 1 per cent each. Instead, overall, the cats devoted between 2.4 and 7.8 per cent of their time to eating, 4.6 to 7.9 per cent to grooming, and 9.3 to 15.6 per cent to standing.
If you’ve been keeping track, you already know there’s a whole lot of day left. This the cats reserved for their two primary activities. Sitting occupied them for 20.1 to 41.4 per cent of their time, while a whopping 34.8 to 52.9 per cent went to the really important one: lying.
Feedback would say something about this, but first we’re going to lie down for 4 to 6 hours.
Truncations, extended
Feedback is on a quest to compile a definitive database of unfortunate abbreviations triggered by technological systems, such as the “suggested follow” box on social media that shortened the name of the Stroke Association charity by eight letters. Two more have come our way.
Some years ago, writer Dave Appleby was delighted to have been promoted to assistant headteacher. Soon after, “I applied to attend a conference and proudly filled in my new title on the form where it asked for ‘job role’. ” But Dave was in for a rough experience. “Arriving at the venue, I spent the day meeting other attendees with the name badge pinned to my chest: Dave Appleby, Ass Head.” Fortunately, no pupils were present.
Meanwhile, Mike Petty sent us a one-sentence email we will simply reproduce in full because we have nothing to add (and anyway, adding material seems contrary to the spirit of the exercise). “When I and colleagues set up in business in 1997 as Loughborough Surface Analysis Ltd, little did we realise that for many years to come the default length for the organisation-name field on conference name-badges would be 25 characters [including spaces].”
Into the wild
It has been over a year since Feedback last checked in on MrBeast, the most popular YouTuber on account of having worked very hard to become popular. Wondering what he might be up to these days, we discovered he has started a paid partnership with Google.
The tech giant announced on 2 September that MrBeast (real name Jimmy Donaldson) is “tapping into Gemini to help him execute wilder concepts, showing his fans how they can use AI to help turn impossibly big ideas into reality”.
Gemini, of course, is Google’s own-brand AI tool. In MrBeast’s first video using Gemini, he and his wife, friends and colleagues split into three teams and race across the Amazon (not all of it), the Arctic (likewise) and a desert to reach rescue helicopters. They use Gemini to help them identify hazards and come up with ways to survive.
By the way, while the official announcement mentions the Arctic, the video repeatedly says that the people in the chilly place were in the Antarctic, so Feedback isn’t entirely clear which end of the planet they went to. Details, amirite?
Anyway, we got a little over 5 minutes into the 23-minute video and didn’t find any instances of them using Gemini. At this point we had got so bored of the constant updates on how far each team had got that we stopped watching.
Our main interest in the video came about due to the recent post on X by Evan Hubinger, alignment science lead at Anthropic, claiming the odds were higher than 10 per cent that AI would “kill all humans” in the next decade.
Extrapolating, we wondered whether MrBeast’s Gemini video might be his last. However, it was titled “I Survived The Most Extreme Places On Earth”, so we assume he made it. However, if his Google deal requires him to make 10 or more videos, the odds are against him.
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