Stop trying to impress me with your pseudoscientifical bullshit. I'm not impressed, I've read worse. Your fly sticking and pictures are fun, but that has nothing to do with earthquakes. Yes, creatures can interpret a variety of signals unreadable for machine (and not because it's impossible, noone just bothered to waste his time coding it, serious image processing will eat your pics for breakfast), but that is totally irrelevant. Those signals are man-made. Earthquakes don't generate pictures with distorted letters. Unless there's a dwarf underground with a signal emitter that sends encrypted transmissions of "run for your lives" cats have a natural decryptor for, there's nothing to talk about.

I am frustrated as I'm explaining obvious stuff. Please stop speaking on something that has zero relevance to the subject.

EmeraldSparks

United States1451 Posts

April 18 2008 19:22 GMT

#22

Unless you're going to assert that all natural signals can be read as plain as day, then whether the signal is artificial or not has no bearing on whether a signal that is hard to extract exists. It's separating the message from the noise, which must be done *whenever* you're trying to gain information from sensory measurements, whether the signal is clear or noisy. Nobody is arguing that earthquakes create distorted letter images (and I'm not sure why you're saying it,) but what it is saying is that computer analysis may not always be the best at finding the information that isn't readily obvious when analyzed certain ways.

What I'm saying is that it's frequently *hard* to extract information from a noisy signal, and it's possible that while a computer program isn't able to do said extraction, a cat might be able to.

Edited for civility.

Myrmidon

United States9452 Posts

April 18 2008 19:22 GMT

#23

I think the argument you want to be making is that we don't know completely what phenomena are good predictive indicators of coming earthquakes (i.e. not detecting the preliminary waves before the real quake, before that), whereas some of these phenomena related to earthquakes may agitate animals.

The issue is about discerning which information is useful and which is garbage, not whether or not animals can take measurements in any fashion better than the best machines.

edit: "noise" probably implies you know what kind of thing you're measuring and where you're measuring it but whatever

Well in any case after reading the thread now I have an image in my mind about cats internally performing FFTs.

BluzMan

Russian Federation4235 Posts

April 18 2008 19:54 GMT

#24

We don't know, sure. But an earthquake singificantly manifesting itself in anything but acoustic oscillations or electromagnetic radiation (possible in a very weird scenario, but not likely) of whatever kind is highly unlikely. Natural chaotic process generating a high-complexity signal that behaves in a special way in terms of noise/signal separation is highly unlikely, they just don't behave this way. Cats developing a very complex decryption algorithm that surpasses whatever signal processing known to humans for no evolutionary reason (you're not gonna tell me that earthquakes were the most influencing survival factor for cats, right?) is highly unlikely. Anything is possible. Your fingers can tunnel through the keyboard, but it's highly unlikely, so it's not worth considering.

There's too many "highly unlikely"'s to make this discussion worthwhile. Yes, there have been "multiple reports" of it, like there have been multiple reports of UFO sightings, alien abduction, miraclous healing, resurrection and whatever other myths. Until someone conducts a scientific experiment that statistically proves (with a large sample size to cut away cats that are crazy, experience health issues and such) animals show weird behavior preceding earthquakes before any equipment shows any reliable data, this is all worth nothing.

EmeraldSparks

United States1451 Posts

April 18 2008 20:05 GMT

#25

The first one doesn't need to be true, the second one is misleading because it doesn't have to "behave a special way," so we're left with evolutionary significance... and a factor doesn't need to be the "most influencing" to affect evolution. Many features have developed which might seem to be very minor, but it's not like just because it's minor nature is going to ignore it. It's not especially unlikely that for animals dwelling on mountains, or perhaps underground or in caves or whatever, where seismic events are infrequent, that knowing when an earthquake was coming wouldn't have an effect.

It's misleading to characterize that level of "unlikely" as the likelihood that my fingers will tunnel through the keyboard.

Of course there have been no official studies, so if you're going to take that as your only measure of truth, then this among other things is worth nothing and the discussion can end. Just remember that studies are done because of hypotheses which people consider in the absence of conclusive evidence.

BluzMan

Russian Federation4235 Posts

April 18 2008 20:28 GMT

#26

Please go learn signal/noise separation. To behave in a way that we can't separate it from noise but something else could, a signal (or noise) has to be a special case. As for the third point, just no. Complex stuff doesn't grow out of nowhere, at least it's highly unlikely.

There is no truth. There is reliable data and unreliable data. That data is unreliable.

EmeraldSparks

United States1451 Posts

April 18 2008 20:46 GMT

#27

This isn't about the reliability of the data, but the plausibility of the hypothesis based on limited observations. If somebody were to do a proper, "can animals predict earthquakes," study, you assert that it would be about as likely from him to receive evidence that animals can interpret their data to predict earthquakes better than humans, as for my hands to fall through my computer?

In terms of animal intelligence, it has to start from somewhere, which is ultimately in the beginning nwohere.

BluzMan

Russian Federation4235 Posts

April 18 2008 21:06 GMT

#28

Either noone bothered (low success expectancy - whoever studied the underlying data for this "hypothesis" didn't find such experiments worthwhile) or someone carried it out and found out nothing.

I admit I'm not a specialist on cat senses, but afaik it's official that cats can outhear human, but cannot outhear equipment. That is enough to explain most of the cases and the rest could be easily thrown out to exaggeration and errors (i.e. linking animal behavior to some event when in fact the owner just forgot to feed it). There's no reason to even start such a research.