
Sequential Testing for Determining Cat Chirality - gwern
http://blog.dimview.org/math/2017/07/28/cat-chirality.html
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gwern
The end result: sequential testing terminated without accepting either
hypothesis [http://blog.dimview.org/math/2017/10/15/cat-
chirality.html](http://blog.dimview.org/math/2017/10/15/cat-chirality.html)

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amelius
Hmm, there should be three hypotheses: cw, ccw, and no-preference.

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charlieo88
Or a forth, subjects become aware of data collection and purposefully skew the
data because lets face it, cats are jerks.

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ianai
I’m betting there may be preferences for individual cats, but not symbolic of
the entire cat population. If anything, cats are almost pathological about
generalizations. If you assume to know what cat will want to do then cat just
might detect your assumption and decide to change. I’ve seen them do this too
much to discount it.

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nkoren
It's because an observer collapses the wavefunction. Everybody thinks that
Schrödinger was being metaphorical -- but no, he was actually talking about
_cats_.

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exabrial
Ok, I know this is a little bit silly but on the similar subject... but has
anyone noticed pomeranian dogs tend to circle clockwise instead of counter-
clockwise? My friend's dog does it so much we nicknamed her "The Anti-NASCAR".

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trothamel
Research of this importance is deserving of an ig-Nobel prize.

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DaiPlusPlus
We now need to determine the spin direction of buttered toast.

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yesenadam
That field met its Einstein with Chris Smith's epochal 2013 work.

Google "chris smith manchester toast" and persevere longer than I did to find
the paper the newspaper stories are talking about.

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PakG1
The unfortunate thing is that to get complete data, you'd need full web cam
coverage of your home in order to catch all instances of your cat sleeping
over 24 hours. Otherwise your data risks being incomplete, or worse, skewed.
The level of rigor required necessitates that only the most dedicated cat
owners can study this phenomena.

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jimmcslim
I initially thought this has something to do with the concept of chirality in
lifeforms...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiral_life_concept](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiral_life_concept)

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xelxebar
You might like the book Axiomatic. It's a collection of short stories by Greg
Egan, and one of them has a plot involving Chiral humans.

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partycoder
cc and ccw are not the only cat sleeping positions. I've seen some cats
sleeping on their backs, and others sleep in a sphynx-like position.

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unknownkadath
I believe that the technical term for that last one is "loaf."

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colanderman
Rabbit parent, not cat parent here, but I hear "loaf" used to refer
specifically to the pose in which the front feet are curled underneath the
body, and thus hidden:
[http://i.imgur.com/Y2bBtBy.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/Y2bBtBy.jpg)

Whereas the Sphinx has its feet extended in front of itself:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Great_Sp...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Great_Sphinx_of_Giza_-_20080716a.jpg)
(which is indeed another rabbit sleeping pose; presumably cats do as well)

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dfox
I dont think that I've ever seen cat really sleeping in one of these
positions, they usually change position after they are really deep asleep and
are then either curled up or in some totally ridiculous position.

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discoursism
I would have expected the center area to get wider as we move up and to the
right.

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cornholio
Because the sample number increases, the confidence improves and the test can
detect lower and lower biases from the 0.5 chirality preference probability.

