6 ms·
My cat is crazy accurate for time down to the minute. I can be sitting reading, on the web, or watching a movie all of which are random and not repeated at any
by dghughes 3y ago
My cat is crazy accurate for time down to the minute. I can be sitting reading, on the web, or watching a movie all of which are random and not repeated at any specific time. Yet at 9pm exactly any time of the year she sits by the stool and complains if I am not there to give her a treat at 9pm Atlantic time.
Note she does get thrown off by seasonal time changes in the fall and spring but she only needs about a week to reset.
- diggan 3y agoSame with my dogs! One of them come and puts her paw on me at exactly 20:00 every day, down to the minute as well, to remind me that it's foodie time. Maybe I could use my dog instead of NTP and have her press a button that syncs my computers to exactly 20:00? Would work offline at least.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- augusto-moura 3y agoIt gives me an idea of training my dog to hit a button to get food and eventually plot the data onto a graph. Would be funny to draw some patterns from it
- dghlsakjg 3y agoThat’s so interesting. My dog runs on a solar clock. He starts begging for his dentastick when it gets dark out, and stays in bed until the sun comes up in winter.
- hellotheretoday 3y agoWe started using an automated feeder with our dog. It broke one day and we were surprised to see that he was prompting us to feed him almost exactly at the programmed times. Like down to the minute. Not sure if he’s relying on other sensory information like certain smells or sounds. I don’t believe that’s the case; we didn’t replace the broken feeder for 3-4 months and he was able to keep time within a few minutes during that period. Our behavior is erratic and changes often; we work jobs with very inconsistent schedules (thus the automatic feeder) so it’s likely not that our behavior is prompting him as well. We can even observe him consistently going to his feeding area on the security camera at the correct time when no one is home. Interesting stuff!
- jvanderbot 3y agoCircadian cycles are pretty reliable in terms of timekeeping. I end up upstairs every day for lunch at about the same time, and I always find myself in the kitchen grabbing a diet coke at about 130 because I used to grab one after a 1pm meeting for the longest time.
- hellotheretoday 3y agoDoes that hold true for animals though? Modern humans sleep on a pretty consistent schedule but my dog sleeps randomly throughout the day. And unfortunately for him my sleep schedule is utter chaos so he is often up very late And to further make it weird: our vet told us to feed him multiple small feedings throughout the day so the feeder was programmed for 6 feedings with 2 hour intervals from 9am to 9pm. He hit the mark for all feeding times! I still think there is potentially some sort of external prompt(s) though. Circadian rhythm is an excellent idea. Maybe that combined with something hard to detect, like lighting levels (which would explain why the timing shifted a few minutes over a few months). Who knows!
- mrb 3y agoThink about the number of pets doing this at, say, 20:07, and owners not realizing the time accuracy because it's not a round number of minutes after the hour.
- renewiltord 3y agoThere are circadian rhythm genes in c. elegans that take effect even when under artificial light. Also the skill for this is trainable. At school we used to have a bell mark class ends and without a clock or a watch I could predictably tell when the bell would fire. One time I demonstrated this to a friend (both of us kicked out of class) by counting down from 10 on the second to when the bell rang while looking at a blank wall. Strange. But nonetheless true.
- m463 3y agomaybe add an NTP reference clock to biff¹ ...or add it to systemd (it will get there eventually anyway) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biff_(Unix)#Origin_and_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biff_(Unix)#Origin_and_name
- clord 3y agoI suspect in cases like this the dog is hearing something you don't in the environment and has associated it with treat time, creating the expectation. If you reconfigure NTP to use her intuition, you risk biasing whatever the source is, creating a feedback loop that will create drift.
- BirAdam 3y agoMy guinea pig will get really really loud and persistent if she doesn't get her vitamin c laced hay biscuit at 7AM EST. I have no idea how she knows what time it is, but she's super accurate about it as well.
- TomK32 3y agoOnly one? It's recommended to keep at least two as they are very social animals. My four live in the garden, well protected and I'm too chaotic to keep any sort of regular feeding schedule, but they are fine with that, must be exciting for them if an unexpected feed of carrots or cucumbers drops.
- switch007 3y agoTheir guinea pig may cohabit or socialise with non Guinea pigs. Eg rabbits
- TomK32 3y agoInterestingly keeping piggies with rabbits is not allowed in every country. For example here in Austria it's not allowed (according to the 2. Tierhaltungsverordnung Anlage 1 ( 3.6)), while in my native Germany it is.
- switch007 3y agoI’m curious, do you know why? (I don’t understand German)
- BirAdam 3y agoJust the one as her sister died, and then she tried to kill every other I ever tried to pair her with. My dog gets along with her well though, and she gets a lot of human attention.
- TomK32 3y agoAh, yeah the old problem of death. Happened with my first pair of siblings but I added three from piggies from the animal shelter and though it took a while for them to settle in, it worked. Just like with us humans, it becomes easier to fit in with a larger group.
- stronglikedan 3y agoMy dog knows the days of the week too. She knows that Thursday is brewery night, and Sunday is a visit to grandma's. She get confusedly persistent if either event is cancelled.
- cj 3y agoMy dog is the same. I have a friend who spends the day at my house every Thursday. The dog sits by the door waiting, but only on Thursdays!
- fuzzfactor 3y agoI found out my cat could count to four once every fourth day was salmon day.
- geek_at 3y agoPawlow would have something to say about that
- miohtama 3y agoCan my computer get time from your cat? (:
- hinkley 3y agoOur dogs meanwhile get fed at 5:00 and every day they think it must be 5:00 at 4:15-4:25, so it seems my dogs may be Martians.
- Jagerbizzle 3y agoExactly the same here with my golden doodle. We feed her dinner at 4pm and she’s pretty much always off-by-one and comes to check on the status at 3.
- hinkley 3y agoMaybe retrievers are bad at time. The ring leader is a lab.
- Arrath 3y agoGirlfirend's minpin-chihuahua mix is like this. Thinks its breakfast time well before it is, indeed, time for breakfast.
- xkcd-sucks 3y agoIt's written, and seems plausible, that cat territory is bounded by time as well as space; for example one cat might own a place in the morning while another cat owns the same place in the evening, etc.
- aequitas 3y agoThere was this BBC documentary where they tracked cats with GPS called The secret life of cats where they found this behavior. The cats would also visit each others house at different time and eat from each others food.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- qbxk 3y agocat law sounds hard. cat lawyers must make a fortune litigating in cat court
- jesterpm 3y agoIt's even weirder with people: blood sugar level change with how you perceive time to be passing, not the actual amount of time: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1603444113 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1603444113
- glonq 3y agoI better check the oscillator inside my cats, because they want dinner at 4pm plus or minus a half hour.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoIt's not just cats; I think humans are capable of much of the same but we actively suppress it for $reasons. Any time I have an alarm in the middle of the night for any random hh:mm, after just a few days of the same pattern I will naturally wake up exactly 1 or 2 minutes before the alarm as my internal clock knows what to expect. If I ignore it out of laziness and go back to sleep until the alarm rings (literally a minute later) I can break the habit but if I embrace it, it is really accurate and reliable (though thrown off if I went to bed absolutely exhausted, so there are limits as one would naturally expect).
- m463 3y agoReminds me of the feynman book "What do you care what other people think?" There's a chapter: “It’s as Simple as One, Two, Three…” where he talks about and experiments with mental counting and mental time judgement I decided to investigate. I started by counting seconds—without looking at a clock, of course—up to 60 in a slow, steady rhythm: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…. When I got to 60, only 48 seconds had gone by, but that didn’t bother me: the problem was not to count for exactly one minute, but to count at a standard rate. The next time I counted to 60, 49 seconds had passed. The next time, 48. Then 47, 48, 49, 48, 48…. So I found I could count at a pretty standard rate. Now, if I just sat there, without counting, and waited until I thought a minute had gone by, it was very irregular—complete variations. So I found it’s very poor to estimate a minute by sheer guessing. But by counting, I could get very accurate. he goes on to do all kinds of other experiments like counting while running up and down stairs and more... :)
- costcofries 3y agoThey are creatures of habit
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]