Cat Gap (en.wikipedia.org)

Welp. Now I'm in a wikipedia hole of how cats came to be.

Ignoring the much more obvious explanation that they simply buggered off to do their own thing and there was nobody around to bang a plate with a fork.

"We must close the cat gap." - JFK, 1960

I used to run a Twitter bot called @itsavailable that would mine interesting strings that were not registered .com domains and tweet them out at a regular cadence. One of its sources was the most-visited English-language Wikipedia page titles in the past hour.

One of the only domains I ever bothered purchasing for myself was https://catgap.com

The cat gap is due to the long time it took for the mutant descendants of Noah's cats to get to America.

I'm surprised that sampling bias is not in the list. Is it possible that these fossils simply haven't been found yet?

An obvious failure of the Cat Distribution System.

I once was thinking that if intelligent machines surpassed human intelligence, the end game would be human intelligence would atrophy but the machines would continue to serve us.

Then I had a humorous thought - what if this already happened, i.e. cats were superintelligent, invented humans to serve them and then they had no need for their own intelligence.

Cat gap? Divine intervention. The divinity? Cats.

So during what period cats were missing?

Duration is clear, start and end not clear

There are many fascinating things about cats, but one of the things I often think about is how interesting it is that an animal of such solitary nature became domesticated so easily, and how social – and socially intelligent – domestic cats came to be, despite stereotypes. To the point that many housecats, and entire breeds, are called "dog-like" in their demeanor. Female feral cats also form social groups, "colonies", though unfixed males are certainly more territorial. This is evidently an example of neoteny, the retention of juvenile traits in adulthood, seeing that most felids do have a social period while living with their mother and littermates.

I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to dream as a cat. I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream where my body actually changed shape. Being loved just for existing seems like a pretty solid evolutionary strategy.

I’m disappointed this wasn’t about felines

For more cat facts, see CatFACS, cat --help, and man cat.

https://animalfacs.com/catfacs_new

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I was a bit disappointed that this didn't turn out to be analogous to the “bee space”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langstroth_hive#Bee_space

Mr President, we most not allow a cat gap!

This is probably the funniest comment section I've read on HN. Congrats to all.