Gigglebit is Siliconrepublic’s daily dose of the funny and fantastic in science and tech, to help start your day on a lighter note.
Today we look at quite possibly the world’s greatest website, iknowwhereyourcatlives.com, symbolising just how much information is available online.
Have you ever sat down to watch your favourite TV show, before suddenly having the urge to find out where someone’s cat lives? You should check out iknowwhereyourcatlives.com.
Have you ever tried replying to a work email from home, only to realise you would rather utilise a single, clickable ‘random cat’ button, bringing you anywhere in the world to view a cat? Yes? Then you should check out iknowwhereyourcatlives.com.
Have you ever spent an hour browsing through Google Earth, only to think, “needs more cats…”? You should check out iknowwhereyourcatlives.com.
This website is simple, and great. It’s simply great.
The gifs on iknowwhereyourcatlives.com’s homepage are quality
Even for those who don’t like cats, perhaps people who are feline a bit left out, worried that the world has gone into a catatonic state over some cold-hearted, evil, irritating beings, this utilisation of public information online is something to marvel at.
Maps! Who doesn’t like maps?
There’s an interactive world map on iknowwhereyourcatlives.com, with 1m pictures of cats, and the location those pictures were taken from. There are charts – both bar and pie – breaking it all down per country. There are even weird gifs on the homepage.
Turns out Italy is quite the cat haven …
It’s collated quite cleverly, too.
“Currently, there are 15m images tagged with the word ‘cat’ on public image hosting sites, and daily thousands more are uploaded from unlimited positions on the globe,” reads the site’s blog.
“I Know Where Your Cat Lives is a data experiment that visualises a sample of 1m public pics of cats on a world map, locating them by the latitude and longitude co-ordinates embedded in their metadata.
“The cats were accessed via publicly available APIs provided by popular photo-sharing websites. The photos were then run through various clustering algorithms using a supercomputer at Florida State University in order to represent the enormity of the data source.”
Accuracy not the be all and end all …
Of course just because pictures are tagged as ‘cat’, it certainly doesn’t always ring true. For example here’s a ‘cat’ we found yesterday, in Oslo, Norway, ripping through whatever was in sight and then feeling fairly chuffed afterwards.
Not a cat, fairly happy about that …
Not a cat, but pretty proud about that …
Not a cat, and bloody chuffed to bits about that …
Kitten at home image via Shutterstock
