Hasta La Gadget!

With the elections nearing, it should come as no surprise that most of the people in your network are talking about politics and holding impromptu debates on Facebook. That is, if you live in the United States.

You could swear off Facebook until the elections are over. You could de-activate and spend your time doing more productive things. Or you could just get Unpolitic.me and continue wasting your time on the social network while blocking out anything that’s related to politics.

Unpolitic.me is an extension for Chrome that automatically detects and blocks out politics-related content with pictures of adorable cats. How great is that?

The extension is developed by the same group of people who came up with Unbaby.me, which blocks out baby-related stuff that people in your network are posting.

[via Geekologie]

We can thank the Japanese for another wacky gadget that has just been unveiled. The device is called the Shippo, and is a concept right now. It’s a white, fuzzy cat tail that reacts based on the wearer’s mood.

It looks like the perfect complement to Neurowear’s mind controlled robotic cat ears we talked about a while back. The idea is that the wearer would have some sort of sensor on their head that would detect their mood and wag the tail in relation to how they felt. When excited, the tail would wag rapidly.

When relaxed, the tail would wag slowly, and when scared apparently the tail wouldn’t wag at all. The tail works in conjunction with a smartphone app that allows the user to search out places where other users of the Shippo where relaxed. You can even list where wearers found someone else they like wearing the tail, in case they want to meet up. Check out the video above for a glimpse at all the cat tail weirdness.

[via io9]

Cats are cute. Maybe the cutest thing ever. They are even cuter when they are piloting cardboard military vehicles like this one. You can call it the Meow 1 Abrams if you want. Or the Kitty Panzer.

This kitty in his cardboard vehicle of destruction will lay waste to all other cute cat videos and pictures. At least until someone turns the vacuum cleaner on. Then it’s time to didi mao and head for cover under a bed or a couch.

And what you don’t see in the pic is that there’s another kitty hiding in the box, a gunner who shoots hairballs with amazing accuracy as he meows furiously.

(P.S. If you don’t happen to have the cardboard boxes and paper tubes lying around to make one of these for yourself, you can always pick up Suck UK’s version, but it just doesn’t quite have the same charm.)

[via Obvious Winner]

Now before you get all mad at me for saying that I was kind of disappointed in the big noisy mess that was The Avengers, I must mention that I was battling the brain-bending side effects of a new medicine, combined with the headache inducing 3D glasses and an IMAX screen on the day I saw it, so maybe I need to give it another chance when it comes out on Blu-ray. But for now, here’s a film that I’d most definitely go see in the mean time.

Yes, those are cats – dressed up as Thor, Captain America, Iron Man and The Hulk. Well The Hulk isn’t exactly dressed – hes’ more like a big naked green cat. But that doesn’t make the Cat Avengers any less awesome. I love how Captain (or is it Cattail?) America looks kind of spooked by Thor’s electric hammer. Though I was hoping to see a rat dressed as Loki.

This hilarious digital painting comes from the mind of Alana McCarthy of GeekyPet, and is available as a 10″ x 8″ digital print over on Etsy for about $15(USD). While you’re over there, be sure to check out Alana’s other geeky animal creations, including Batcat, Jabba the Cat and Captain Jean-Mewc Piccat (I made that name up but I thought it fit.)

Don’t tell Google, but its latest X lab project is something performed by the great internet public every day. For free. Mountain View’s secret lab stitched together 1,000 computers totaling 16,000 cores to form a neural network with over 1 billion connections, and sent it to YouTube looking for cats. Unlike the popular human time-sink, this was all in the name of science: specifically, simulating the human brain. The neural machine was presented with 10 million images taken from random videos, and went about teaching itself what our feline friends look like. Unlike similar experiments, where some manual guidance and supervision is involved, Google’s pseudo-brain was given no such assistance.

It wasn’t just about cats, of course — the broader aim was to see whether computers can learn face detection without labeled images. After studying the large set of image-data, the cluster revealed that indeed it could, in addition to being able to develop concepts for human body parts and — of course — cats. Overall, there was 15.8 percent accuracy in recognizing 20,000 object categories, which the researchers claim is a 70 percent jump over previous studies. Full details of the hows and whys will be presented at a forthcoming conference in Edinburgh.

Google simulates the human brain with 1000 machines, 16000 cores and a love of cats originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Jun 2012 07:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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