Talk:Ray cat

To redirect

• Ray CatRay Cat
• Radiation catRadiation cat
• Ray catsRay cats
• Ray CatsRay Cats
• Radiation catsRadiation cats
• Françoise BastideFrançoise Bastide
• Don't Change Color, KittyDon't Change Color, Kitty to section
• Don't Change Color KittyDon't Change Color Kitty as {{a2r}}/{{r from misspelling}}
• 10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty)10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color, Kitty) as {{a2r}}/{{r from long name}}
• 10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color Kitty)10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don't Change Color Kitty) as {{a2r}}/{{r from long name}}/{{r from misspelling}}
• 10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories as {{a2r}}/{{r from other name}}
• Oakland RaycatsOakland Raycats

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she|they|xe)

In re review in progress

@Robert McClenon: I am the primary author of this draft, and it was submitted to AfC without anyone asking me. Now, draftspace drafts don't belong to anyone, but I had more that I planned to write, and if I'd been asked I would have said no, don't submit this, I'll just go ahead and finish it and then mainspace it myself. (I had only stopped because I'd offered someone else the chance to write a portion of it, and they never got around to it.) So, just to save you the time of reviewing something I intend to publish either way, I thought I'd let you know, if you'd like to put it on hold or procedurally decline or whatever is bureaucratically the best way to handle that. All the best. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 00:17, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

User:Tamzin - I have unmarked it for review. Any other reviewer may decline it. Any other reviewer may accept it if they have the Page Mover permission, or if they know how to request that a blocking redirect be deleted. (It is surprising how many reviewers don't know that they can tag a blocking redirect for {{db-afc-move}}). Robert McClenon (talk) 03:07, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. :) I'll try to finish it up tomorrow, and then I'll just mainspace it myself, since it was never intended as an AfC draft. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 03:37, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by AirshipJungleman29 talk 13:01, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

(

• Comment or view
• Article history

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An artist's impression of a ray cat

• ... that to create nuclear waste warnings that would still be understood in 10,000 years, two philosophers proposed genetically engineering cats to change appearance around radiation? Source: Beauchamp, Scott (2015-02-24). "How to Send a Message 1,000 Years to the Future". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on 2015-02-26. Retrieved 2023-01-15.
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Beeper (company); Template:Did you know nominations/Sydney asbestos crisis
  • Comment: This might make a good quirky hook.^(?) Note: Article contains about a paragraph total copied from Zhang 2014. This is done in compliance with WP:PLAGIARISM (Method articles are CC-BY unless stated otherwise), and is not enough text to bring the article below 1,500 characters of prose.

Moved to mainspace by Tamzin (talk). Self-nominated at 21:20, 10 March 2024 (UTC). Post-promotion hook changes for this nom will be logged at Template talk:Did you know nominations/Ray cat; consider watching this nomination, if it is successful, until the hook appears on the Main Page.

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

Image: Image is freely licensed, used in the article, and clear at 100px.
Freely licensed: Used in article: Clear at 100px:

QPQ: Done.

Overall: @Tamzin: Other than the already noted CC-BY content above, most of the Earwig responses are false positives. Hook is interesting and sourced. Good for length and newness. Tamzin is below the emergency QPQ threshhold and 1 QPQ has been provided. I'd be interested in seeing some variants of the hook. Currently it feels, verbose. Happy to proceed. No preference on hook. Image below looks fine as well. All good to go. Seddon ^talk 00:19, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

@Seddon: Personally, I think this is a good use case for a longer-but-still-quirky hook, but okay, how about:

• ALT1: ... that to protect people in the distant future from nuclear waste, two philosophers proposed cats that change appearance around radiation?

-- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 01:15, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

@Seddon and Tamzin: note that as Tamzin has nominated more than twenty articles, two QPQs are needed as the emergency backlog mode is active. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 03:20, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

Second QPQ added. Thanks for pointing this out. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 05:55, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

Come on, no image hook? Bremps... 23:49, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

@Bremps: I didn't propose the image because, great as it is, it's not-independently-significant fan art. But if that doesn't bother the reviewer and promoter, then I'd defer to them. All I'll add is that instead of (pictured) we would want to say (depicted) and then caption as "An artist's impression of a ray cat". -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 02:13, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Good to go. Seddon ^talk 23:49, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

• Tamzin, may this be used for the April Fools' Day set, particularly for the glorious image? MyCatIsAChonk (talk) (not me) (also not me) (still no) 18:56, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

  @MyCatIsAChonk: By all means! If you want a hook that's more April-Fools-y, could do something like

  ALT-4/1: ... that color-changing cats (artist's impression pictured) could help us communicate with the future?

  -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 19:12, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

• Absolutely amazing- it's been set! MyCatIsAChonk (talk) (not me) (also not me) (still no) 20:50, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
• I added the main page image template to the top of the nomination, image checks out CC4.0 and is in article. You may wish to modify the image caption. – Reidgreg (talk) 15:22, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Glowing green?

I can only see the summary online (animals can be bred that will react with discoloration of the skin when exposed) - do Bastide and Fabbri use any language in their 1981 paper that suggest a "glowing" aspect to this, or is that something that's crept in from others writing about the concept since? (I'm not sure how well this bodes for being able to transmit this specific idea intact for 10,000 years...) Belbury (talk) 22:15, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

@Belbury: The official English translation of the article is available for free at (click "preview" to view online or "PDF" to download). Your comment has prompted me to look a bit closer at the original proposal, and interestingly they never specify what the appearance change should be, and even the usage of cats is only presented as one example. So I've updated the article to reflect that (and will update the proposed DYK hook in a sec). As to glowing, Bricobio did suggest making bioluminescent ray cats, although it's not clear whether they actually put any R&D toward that idea. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe) 22:44, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Incorporation into Paolo Fabbri (semiotician)

Greetings, editors! I was glad to come across this article by chance from DYK, having expanded Paolo Fabbri (semiotician) a few weeks ago. I'm not a semiotician and my only interest in Fabbri comes from his connections to Rimini, so I did not know the first thing about ray cats! That biography is very much focussed on his academic career from the various obituaries I found (and, consequently and unfortunately, it reads somewhat like a CV).

For the moment, I've added wikilinks to Ray cat in Fabbri's infobox and See also, but if editors who have worked on this article would be happy to incorporate, as they see fit, Fabbri's connection with ray cats to the main article body at Paolo Fabbri (semiotician), I am sure they could do a far better job than me, knowing much more about this topic. Thanks! IgnatiusofLondon (he/him • ☎️) 13:58, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Critical Thinking?

Isn't the article a little bit uncritical? I know - so far - this is original research. I'm still searching for a reliable critical publication as source. But anyways: in my eyes the whole idea of genetically engineered creatures (may they be cats) to warn people in the future about radiation is totally ridiculous. There are so many problems with this:

1. even if it would be possible to create such an animal - what do you do then? Kill all existing cats and replace them with your cats?
2. How do you produce millions of cats?
3. Do you simply hope that your totally-not-evolutionary-beneficial-trait of glowing is a dominant feature that spreads in the worlds cat population just by itself? Cats can reproduce within half a year. So within 10000 years you will have 20000 generations! 20000 chances that your artificial genes are not inherited.
4. Do you meet a lot of cats near nuclear waste disposals? In deserts? In the mountains? In closed mines?
   

But wait! The cat is only the tip of the iceberg. The piece you can see. The piece you could hold in your hands - if it would exist. The really important part of the ray cat is the accompanying myth. Without the myth the cat is nothing! I would even go as far and say that the cat is just a decoy to mask the real problem: getting a message into the future. That problem is really huge, and the ray cat idea presents it as "oh, and by the way: we need to get the message into the future that radiation is bad. And for that we don't use the cat, because that doesn't work. We will use an accompanying myth for that. See? Problem solved."

1. How do you expect a myth still to have significance for people in 10000 years? Where are the examples for any myth, legend, story, fable, fairytale, religion, or whatever... that is 10000 years old? We live in the year 2025 and know no older story than 5000 years (Epic of Gilgamesh). And most people don't even believe in stories that are 1000 or 2000 years old. For example no Bhuddist believes in the New Testament. And nobody takes medieval fairytales serious.
2. Interpretation of myths can change over time. e.g. the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm: most of them never were intended to be for children or even suitable for children. Today we recount them to children nonetheless. And they also have been altered. For example Snow White's stepmother - originally wasn't her stepmother, but her biological mother - who ordered Snow White's death.
3. Can you really be sure that enough people know the myth? And spread it, even if it has no meaning to them (unlike fables, legends, religions etc. that have underlying meanings and messages about life, society and human behavior?
4. How stupid or how smart do you believe the people to be in 10000 years? Won't they be curious and follow the strange looking cat into the radiation area? Won't they want to find out why it glows? And why it glows right there? Has awe and superstition ever stopped mankind from boldly going where nobody has gone before?
   

If you think about it, every single aspect of the ray cat idea is near impossible to accomplish. And it isn't even a solution for anything. The whole idea to use cats and a myth to communicate a danger to future folks is exactly not working as a way to communicate anything but "this cat is special and this place is special". And that doesn't help anybody. Time for a "problems" section in the article, I say. --TeakHoken2003:ED:1702:500:E802:F4C4:CBA4:5719 (talk) 23:11, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

the song

the article mentions a song that is meant to be catchy for 10,000 years, but does not link the song 69.213.229.109 (talk) 03:39, 7 July 2025 (UTC)