Think about this topic for a minute. Do you really think that cats and software have something in common? Perhaps they both malfunction easily. Or they both behave in strange ways. Read this post by Guest Contributor John Hartsell.
No, this is not a mistyped follow-up to “What do cats and software engineers have in common?”
Both cats and software will sometimes do very strange, totally inexplicable things. A typical manual for a software product might refer to this as “unspecified behavior.”
No matter how much we think we know about any non-trivial software, there’s always the chance it will do something totally strange, completely confounding even the original developers who – at least in theory – should know quite a lot, if not everything, about what their software can and will do.
So it is with cats. No matter how long and hard we study them, they always seem to find some way to astound and tickle and mightily puzzle us with seemingly random behavior, driven by uniquely feline purpose and intent and utterly inscrutable to mere human minds.
Take for example the first cat I and my family ever had, a dark grey and bright white kitty which for reasons lost to history we called Nora-chan. Sometimes my Mom will refer to that cat as “first neko-chan.”
Nora-chan was a great example of a cat with personality. More about that later.
Anyway, one night – I must have been no more than ten or eleven years old – I was in bed and ready to go to sleep. Mom was in the room, cleaning out the litter box (the cat slept in my room back then).
For reasons Nora-chan never discussed, let alone committed to paper, she suddenly started running at full all-out “mad kitty dash” speed on top of my bed, right around the edge.
She ran from the foot to the head of the bed, right along my left side. Then she ran across my chest to the other side of my bed, right down that side, and across the foot of my bed to the corner where Mom stood.
Then Nora-chan stared Mom right in the face and made the sound “T!” Imagine the explosive sound of /t/ like a human forcefully emphasizing the first sound of “terrible” or “treat” or any other English word beginning with T. It sounded like Nora-chan was trying to spit in Mom’s face.
Then she (Nora-chan, not Mom) did the very same sequence of things again!
Then Nora-chan did the sequence a third time!!
I guess that closed whatever action item was on Nora-chan’s hidden agenda, because then she curled herself up and plopped herself down on the bed with a haughty, imperious air of feline self-satisfaction.
I’m sure anyone who has ever been owned by a cat will recognize that attitude projection. I’ve heard that referred to as “cattitude” which pretty much sums it up, I reckon. Anyway…
What was that running and spit-sound-making all about? How does that arise from Nora-chan’s heritage as a stealthy predator, or enhance any feline’s ability to survive in the wild?
What part of Nora-chan’s programming, in kittenhood or adulthood, caused her to run around and make a sound like that?
What triggered that weird response? What input resulted in that very strange output?
Cats and software, eh? 