The post Vacationing With Your Cat: Olga’s Preference by Christopher Bays appeared first on Catster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Catster.com. Hi, I’m Christopher! Read my introduction to learn more about me and my silly Russian Blue cat, Olga. Taking a vacation is more complicated when your cat joins you. Most rental properties only allow dogs, and fewer hotels with pet-friendly policies allow cats. Campsites are also more accepting of canines, but if your cat loves to travel with you, you can find cat-friendly accommodation if you search hard enough. Feline Restrictions It may seem odd that property managers consider cats more destructive than dogs, but dogs are less likely to make a mess because they don’t use a litter box. They’re also not as fond of scratching furniture, which is probably the primary reason for the cats’ exclusion. Olga isn’t a traveling cat and doesn’t enjoy leaving the house, even for a walk in the backyard. I wish I could take her on vacation, but I don’t want her to be miserable, and I don’t think she would enjoy a trip to the beach or mountains. I don’t know many cats that are happy travelers, but I have a few friends who have taken their cats camping. Their cats are more adventurous than Olga and aren’t shy around unfamiliar humans. I’m only giving you the evil eye because you woke me up! Olga and the Great Outdoors If she were confined to a tent, Olga would have an anxiety attack and probably claw her way out. She’s never been in one, but she hates closed doors and knows how to open them, as long as they’re unlocked. She couldn’t join me on most hiking trails, especially the ones that allow dogs, because she’s not leash-trained or used to being in the wilderness. Some cats are more suitable for traveling than others, and if you want to take your cat on vacation, it’s best to leash-train them and get them used to traveling in a carrier. Training a cat to walk on a leash requires more patience than training a dog, but it’s possible. Cats aren’t eager to please humans and don’t share the long history of working beside humans like dogs. I work hard protecting our home from avian invaders. Training Cats Although they have an enhanced sense of smell and may be able to detect illnesses in humans, cats aren’t as receptive to training as dogs, which is one reason you don’t see them searching for corpses, drugs, or explosives. They’re not stubborn or untrainable, but most people cannot dedicate several hours a day to teaching cats advanced commands and tricks. Thanks for the silvervine stick. I hope you don’t want it back. Training your cat will help you handle them when vacationing, but some personalities are better suited to traveling. Shy cats are not happy travelers, but outgoing felines who love interacting with strange humans and animals are ideal. My Siamese cat was a much better traveler than Olga, and several years ago, I took him with me to the beach. I had to give him IV injections to treat his kidney disease, and I didn’t want to leave him home and rely on someone else to treat him. He was happy to join me and the family at the beach house and seemed to have a great time. Olga would rather stay home and have one of my friends take care of her, and I’m okay with that. Sometimes, cats like Olga need a vacation from us. This article is a part of Christopher and Olga's series. Read his previous article: Putting Clothes on Cats: Why I Avoid It The post Vacationing With Your Cat: Olga’s Preference by Christopher Bays appeared first on Catster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Catster.com.

Column SFF Bestiary A Hodgepodge of Animal Traits: MonsterQuest on the Ozark Howler A cry in the night and a shadow in the woods… By Judith Tarr | Published on August 19, 2024 Credit: The History Channel / Whitewolf Entertainment Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: The History Channel / Whitewolf Entertainment I’m a little disappointed in the Ozark Howler episode of MonsterQuest. I’ve come to rely on them for going to the science, performing experiments, and demonstrating how and why a particular cryptid may or may not exist. Other episodes in the first season have done this, but here they don’t even go to the area. They interview some talking heads and feature a couple of witnesses, but that’s about it. “It’s a real mix of known creatures into this unknown creature.” That’s how one of the talking heads describes the various reports and sightings. It’s a cat, mostly, but it has horns. Its eyes are red; it has a “death stare.” And there’s the cry, which is blood-curdling and terror-inducing. The episode first aired in 2009 but seems to have been updated in 2019 under the title In Search of Monsters, and talks of sightings as recent as 2008. A woman sees a large, black, hairy creature crossing the road at night. A man sees “a black Howler” at the end of his driveway. A couple hear screaming in the woods around their property, and catch something on a game camera. A reporter mentions the photo of the cat-dog with the deer horns, but that’s dismissed as a hoax. The episode progresses from most to least probable. The first suggestion is that it’s a large feline, Mountain lions have been sighted in the area, but animal experts maintain that these particular cats do not have a melanistic variant. Leopards and jaguars do, but neither is native to that part of the continent. Leopards are native to Africa. Jaguars range from South America into the far south of Arizona, but not as far north as the Ozarks. There is the possibility of an escaped zoo animal or exotic pet. The problem with that is that both leopards and jaguars are tropical and subtropical animals. They’re unlikely to be able to survive the harsh winters of the region. So maybe, the experts opine, it’s something more unusual. It might be a prehistoric survivor. In cryptozoology, that’s called a Lazarus taxon, a creature presumed to be extinct but found to still exist. (I’ll be talking about this, actually, in a later section of the Bestiary.) There are a couple of candidates. One would be a creature called Panthera atrox, the American lion. It was very large, and supposedly the male and female were different colors. The male was “regular-colored,” i.e. light brown or tan, and the female was black. This species went extinct around the end of the Ice Age. The other likely suspect would be the smilodon or sabertooth cat. This massive, muscular, shaggy animal was notable for its enormous canine teeth, but it’s presumed to have been grey or greyish brown and possibly spotted, rather than black. Whether it had a melanistic variant, the experts don’t know. They lean more toward the American lion in that case. The episode moves away from physical manifestations at this point and focuses on the sounds it makes. People who live in the area maintain that they hear weird and unsettling sounds in the woods. But as one of the experts points out, the human imagination is a fertile and flexible thing. If it hears something unusual or untoward, it makes up stories and invents creatures that might have made the sounds. I’ll add that when witnesses combine darkness, deep woods, and the cries of distant or unseen animals, they quickly move past the ordinary or the familiar to the weird and the terrifying. The mating cry of a female fox can sound like a human screaming in terror or a creature dying in agony. Mountain lions in search of mates will call back and forth, and their calls may seem to be coming from all directions at once. I yelled at the screen at a couple of points. Whoever the sound engineer was, they seriously needed to be educated on the fact that mountain lions don’t roar. They can’t. Their larynges aren’t capable of it. They can purr. They hiss and growl. And they yowl and shriek. Even a domestic cat can make an ungodly racket when it’s fighting or when it’s in heat. When I was a kid, we had a female Siamese who didn’t get spayed before her first heat. The noises she made were outright blood-curdling, and could be heard all the way down our very long driveway. That was an eight-pound cat. Imagine that a cat twenty times that size can do when she’s looking for love. Anyway. There’s no conclusion drawn in the episode. It moves on to the couple with the game camera. They recorded what seemed to be as many as three creatures calling back and forth—which indicates that if the Howler exists, there’s more than one of it. What seems notable to these witnesses is that the local dogs react to the howling. “The longer it goes on, the dogs become more and more intimidated.” The expert called in to view the footage doesn’t commit to any species. He suggests that it may be something unknown. I’m not sure if that’s a responsible thing for him to do. He doesn’t test the audio, he doesn’t take it to a lab. Basically he just up and guesses. To me the recording sounds more like wolves or other canines than cats. Awoo rather than a feline yowl or scream. But there’s no speculation as to whether these are wolves or coyotes, or possibly feral dogs. The episode skips past the audio to a section of video that purports to be an image of the actual Howler. It’s blurry and pixelated. My eye, matrixing it, gives me something like a baboon. I don’t see a cat or a canine. It may be full-on matrixing: the eye trying to create a pattern out of an image of leaves and branches. The animal expert says he sees a big cat, and we’re shown an image of a tiger. He can’t identify the creature, but it seems to me that he’s trying to fit the pixels to some sort of feline because that’s his area of expertise. As with the audio, I’d like to have seen more testing by a less biased observer. Do the sounds correlate with any known animal’s call? And does the image portray something physical, or is it a trick of the eye? Having failed to draw any empirical or scientific conclusions, the episode moves on to the paranormal. Black cats historically are bad luck, we’re told. They’re “inherently evil.” They’re associated with witchcraft and the demonic. Maybe they’re shapeshifting witches. Or at least a witch’s familiar. There’s even a historical connection. Well, not exactly, but a witch in the 1500s supposedly had a demonic cat named Satan or Sathan, and he apparently was huge and had horns. So maybe somehow that legend, or one very similar to it, made it into the Ozarks with European settlers. Witchcraft was a frequent practice among the colonists. Maybe the Howler was, or is, a witch’s familiar, or a witch in animal form. Or else it’s a demon—and then we have to ask, does it serve the witches, or do the witches serve it? By this point the show has moved away from cryptozoology and into the world of myth and magic. One thing it does stress, however, and that’s the fact that there has never been a documented attack on a human. The Howler is scary, but it doesn’t appear to be dangerous. There is one possible exception to this. That’s the concept of the “death stare” and the idea that the Howler is a harbinger of death. Like the banshee, if it howls for you, you’re fated to die. But that’s a minor part of the whole story. Mostly, the Howler is a cry in the night and a shadow in the woods. The rest is in the minds of the humans who hear and glimpse it.[end-mark] The post A Hodgepodge of Animal Traits: <i>MonsterQuest</i> on the Ozark Howler appeared first on Reactor.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. San Francisco’s City Council has decided to deal with the problem of soaring housing costs by banning websites that allow landlords to determine their rents using rental market data. Other than indicating that local authorities in San Francisco have chosen to hide their head in the sand rather than deal with the crisis, the ban could also violate the First Amendment. What critics likely see as the Council’s fairly irrational move, where the city caved to activists’ arguments and “embraced” them, implies that access to this information – on sites such as RealPage and Yardi – is the actual reason behind the big rise in rents. An ordinance issued by the Council bans “algorithmic devices performing calculations of non-public competitor data concerning local or statewide rents or occupancy levels” when these “devices” are there to help landlords decide on the rent, or whether to rent their property at all. We obtained a copy of this ordinance for you here. Comparing prices and knowing what the competition is up to has been a well-established, and legal practice in real estate in general and beyond, in many businesses. But it seems that in San Francisco, this is now considered a form of price fixing. Banning information (rather than some practice) is where things get into the First Amendment territory. Since the decision was made by a local authority, it means that a government entity is engaged in withholding information from people out of fear of their reaction – and that is something that runs afoul of that constitutional amendment. As proof to this effect, reports critical of San Francisco Council’s ideas now cite rulings, notably the Supreme Court decision in 1976 Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council. The 1976 Supreme Court case, Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, Inc., marked a significant moment in the evolution of First Amendment jurisprudence, particularly concerning commercial speech. In this case, the Virginia State Board of Pharmacy had enforced a Virginia statute that prohibited the advertising of prescription drug prices. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, representing consumers, challenged the law, arguing that the prohibition of advertising drug prices was an infringement on their First Amendment rights, as it restricted the free flow of information. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Consumer Council. The Court held that the First Amendment protects the right to receive information just as much as it protects the right to speak. The Court reasoned that the free flow of commercial information is important to enable consumers to make informed choices in the marketplace. The justices concluded that the Virginia statute was unconstitutional because it restricted truthful, non-misleading commercial speech without a sufficient justification, thus violating the First Amendment. This ruling was pivotal as it extended First Amendment protections to commercial speech, which had previously been given less protection under the law. This decision laid the groundwork for later decisions that further developed the concept of commercial speech and its protections. Instead of pandering to what appear to be simplistic, activist-driven conclusions about the core causes of the housing crisis, those same reports recommend that the Council “looks in the mirror” and accepts what it sees: that behind the mess are its own policies such as zoning, permit issuing process, rent-control, and other rules. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post San Francisco City Council Bans Rental Data Websites, Faces First Amendment Concerns appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

ROI Rage: Does Kamala Know What 'Pay For' Means?

A new study argues that ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) are incapable of independent learning or acquiring skills without human input. This pours cold water on the belief that such systems could pose existential risks to humanity.LLMs are scaled up versions of pre-trained language models (PLMs), which are trained on massive amounts of web-scale data bodies. This access to such immense amounts of data makes them capable of understanding and generating natural language and other content that can be used for a large range of tasks.However, they can also exhibit “emergent abilities”, which are essentially random performances that they were not explicitly trained for. This has included conducting tasks that would otherwise require some form of reasoning. For instance, an emergent ability could include an LLM's ability to understand social situations, inferred by it performing above the random baseline on the Social IQA – a measure of commonsense reasoning about social situations.The inherent unpredictability associated with emergent abilities, especially given that LLMs are being trained on even larger datasets, raises substantial questions about safety and security. Some have argued that future emergent abilities could include potentially hazardous abilities, including reasoning and planning, which could threaten humanity.However, a new study has shown that LLMs have a superficial ability to follow instructions and excel at proficiency in language, but they have no potential to master new skills without explicit instruction. This means they are inherently predictable, safe, and controllable, though they can still be misused by people.As these models continue to be scaled up, they are likely to generate more sophisticated language and become more accurate when faced with detailed and explicit prompts, but they are highly unlikely to gain complex reasoning.“The prevailing narrative that this type of AI is a threat to humanity prevents the widespread adoption and development of these technologies, and also diverts attention from the genuine issues that require our focus,” Dr Harish Tayyar Madabushi, a computer scientist at the University of Bath, explained in a statement.Tayyar Madabushi and colleagues, led by Professor Iryna Gurevych at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, ran experiments to test the ability of LLMs to complete tasks that the models have never come across – basically their propensity to generate emergent abilities.When it came to their ability to perform above the random baseline on the Social IQA, past researchers assumed the models “knew” what they were doing. However, the new study argues that this is not the case. Instead, the team show that the models were using a well-known ability to complete tasks based on a few examples presented to them – what is known as “in-context learning” (ICL).      IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.By running over 1,000 experiments, the team demonstrated that the ability for LLMs to follow instructions (ICL), their memory, and linguistic proficiency can explain their capabilities and their limitations.“The fear has been that as models get bigger and bigger, they will be able to solve new problems that we cannot currently predict, which poses the threat that these larger models might acquire hazardous abilities including reasoning and planning,” Tayyar Madabushi added.“This has triggered a lot of discussion – for instance, at the AI Safety Summit last year at Bletchley Park, for which we were asked for comment – but our study shows that the fear that a model will go away and do something completely unexpected, innovative and potentially dangerous is not valid.”Importantly, the fears over the existential threats posed by these models are not unique to non-experts; they have also been expressed by the top AI researchers across the world. However, the team believe the fear is unfounded as the tests clearly show the absence of emergent complex reasoning abilities in LLMs.“While it's important to address the existing potential for the misuse of AI, such as the creation of fake news and the heightened risk of fraud, it would be premature to enact regulations based on perceived existential threats,” Tayyar Madabushi said.“Importantly, what this means for end users is that relying on LLMs to interpret and perform complex tasks which require complex reasoning without explicit instruction is likely to be a mistake. Instead, users are likely to benefit from explicitly specifying what they require models to do and providing examples where possible for all but the simplest of tasks.”However, the team do stress that these results do not rule out all threats related to AI. As Professor Gurevych explained, “[We] show that the purported emergence of complex thinking skills associated with specific threats is not supported by evidence and that we can control the learning process of LLMs very well after all. Future research should therefore focus on other risks posed by the models, such as their potential to be used to generate fake news."The study is published in Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics. 

One of the compounds discovered was the rare metal osmium, which is used in telecommunications and satellites in the space industry, but is considered dangerous to humans. Mexican journalist and ufologist Jaime Maussan claims that “alien mummies” found in Peru have rare metals and alloys implanted in their chests. He believes these devices, like mobile phones, could be used for intergalactic communication. “I believe it’s a communication device. I don’t know exactly how it works, but experts will have to work hard to figure out why it was put inside the body,” says the paranormal expert. The famous Nazca Mummies have been shrouded in controversy since they were first presented to the world back in 2017. Alongside many scientists who specialize in forensics, Latin American journalists Jaime Maussan and Jois Mantilla have remained at the forefront of this case. They are doubling down on what they believe to be one of the most important discoveries in human history. According to him, one of the compounds discovered is the rare metal osmium, which is used in telecommunications and satellites in the space industry, but is potentially lethal to humans. “Osmium is not easy to find; it is very expensive and, in addition, toxic. It can cause serious problems in the human body and even lead to death. That is why it is difficult to understand why this was done. If you were going to create such a hoax, would you use such a rare metal?” Maussan reflects. Now, scientists in forensic laboratories are examining the bodies that the ufologist found in a cave in Nazca, Peru, back in 2017. The “aliens,” with elongated skulls, are said to have 30% unknown DNA. However, skeptics call it a hoax. According to them, the “mummies” could have been made from parts of various animals. Jaime Maussan teamed up with investigative filmmakers Serena DC and Michael Mazzola to document the scientific experiments for their documentary. “It is completely bizarre to me that these discoveries have been ignored, dismissed and ridiculed; instead of being considered as the biggest story in the world of science. When I first saw these creatures, I took them for a new species, previously unknown. This is a great discovery for humanity,” Michael says confidently. “People are always eager to invoke some kind of conspiracy theory to explain why some injustices have happened. But in my experience you do not need a conspiracy theory when human frailty or failure will do just fine.” The post Rare Metal Osmium Found in Alleged Alien Mummies appeared first on Anomalien.com.

A viral video clip has sparked intrigue online, depicting what seems to be a ghostly figure caught on a CCTV camera. The eerie figure, however, is invisible when viewed directly. According to the video’s caption on Instagram, the footage was captured by a bus conductor during routine post-service checks. While reviewing the CCTV feed, he noticed a passenger still seated on the bus, despite it supposedly being empty. Confused, the conductor aimed his phone camera at the seat in question, only to find it completely vacant. But when he looked back at the CCTV monitor, the mysterious passenger—a man in a white shirt—was still visible, seated alone on the otherwise deserted bus. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Bien_forever (@bien_forever) This has led to a puzzling inconsistency: if the apparition only appears on camera, why didn’t it show up on the conductor’s phone camera as well? The origins of the footage remain unclear, but it has quickly gained traction on Instagram, amassing hundreds of thousands of views. The question remains: is this truly evidence of a ghost on board? The most plausible explanation is that the CCTV monitor was displaying a recording from an earlier time when someone was indeed sitting in that seat. It could be a technical glitch, or perhaps the entire scenario was staged as a prank. The post Viral Video Sparks Debate: Ghostly Figure Caught on Bus CCTV? appeared first on Anomalien.com.

[Last] week, alleged comedian Stephen Colbert had on CNN's Kaitlan Collins to discuss the 2024 presidential election. In the middle of the interview, Colbert began to ask Collins a question, in all sincerity: "I know you guys are objective over (at CNN), you just report the news as it is." Colbert, presumably, expected his audience — all Kamala Harris fans, since Colbert is the most left-leaning host on late night television — to nod along. Instead, they laughed. They laughed because everyone in America knows, at this point, that the media have become stenographers for the Democratic Party. That process was well underway decades ago but accelerated dramatically under Barack Obama. Obama's candidacy wasn't treated like a normal candidacy in 2008; relevant stories ranging from his association with radical America-hating antisemite Jeremiah Wright to his corrupt connections in Chicago politics were quickly swept under the rug, deemed irrelevant in Obama's quest for the White House. The media became cheerleaders. And they haven't stopped. They spent four long years treating Donald Trump not just as a pariah but as a traitor to the country. Every Trump tweet was treated as a declaration of war on the American people; every Trump policy was greeted with the sort of horror normally reserved for nuclear war. Meanwhile, non-legacy media outlets were deemed misinformation and disinformation, threats to the republic itself. Social media outlets that deigned to allow distribution of such alternative media were themselves targeted as abiding dangers to democracy. Then Joe Biden was elected. For the next three-and-a-half years, the media did their best to treat his policies as benevolent and intelligent, even as inflation climbed to four-decade highs and the Middle East burst into flames. They treated his obvious senility as a matter not of controversy, but of established fact: It was a fact, they said, that he was doing just fine. Sure, he might be aging, but he was all there. Then Joe Biden blew it all up. Insistent on his own durability and intellectual command — believing his own press clippings, presumably — Biden engaged in a debate with Donald Trump. He proceeded to crumble on national television. And for approximately three weeks, the media did their jobs. They asked questions. They brought pressure to bear on Democratic lawmakers and White House insiders. And Joe Biden stepped aside. Then, quick as lightning, the legacy media returned to their Obama-era identity: as water carriers for Kamala Harris. The same candidate they had once deemed incompetent and awkward, the same vice president they had once deemed irrelevant and off-putting, was now a goddess of political oratory. Her inheritance of the Democratic nomination meant a new round of legacy media prostration before the new crowned heir. And the heir is not to be questioned. Not about her lies. Not about the policies of her administration. Not about her kaleidoscopically shifting positions or her hideously dishonest vice presidential pick. We are now 25 days into Kamala Harris' nomination. She has not answered a single, solitary adversarial question. She has not sat for a single interview — even with allies. She has not done a single serious press conference. And the media cheer. That is why the Colbert audience scoffs at CNN. Because they know the truth, as everyone does: that the legacy media are a propaganda outlet on behalf of the Democratic Party. That they act as a Praetorian Guard for Kamala Harris. That they deserve less than zero respect for their pseudo-journalism. They may be able to maintain the current cone of silence around Harris. They might be able to propel her to the White House on vibes alone. But sooner or later, the American people will wise up to the legacy media and realize that they belong on the ash heap of history. Ben Shapiro's new collection, "Facts and Furious: The Facts About America and Why They Make Leftists Furious," is available now. Shapiro is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of "The Ben Shapiro Show," and co-founder of Daily Wire+. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author. To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.