On Cats, Inanity, and Procrastination.

Instead of writing an essay about the epistemology of writing and procrastination, I've been looking at funny pictures of cats.

Examples:




I soon realized that the websites used to peddle these images are diabolical in nature. Surely nothing can come of this phenomenon but wasted productivity and an increase in the use of lolspeakz on the internet.

I wasn't satisfied with that summary judgement, though, so I decided to dig a bit further into empirical studies regarding human intelligence and the influence of cats.

This is what I found:

(Special thanks to Randall for writing/drawing xkcd every day.)

I was almost satisfied with this data, until I realized that whatever specific effect we can see from proximity to cats in the real world, there is a much larger and more virulent effect coming from the influence of photographed animals of many different species.

e.g. the Bucket Walrus:

(moar funny pictures)

So I'm lost for an explanation again, and I haven't written anything useful in the last two hours.
Hurray for the internet!