
Mosfet the cat 2001 – 2018 - jonbaer
https://blog.adafruit.com/2018/02/28/in-loving-memory-mosfet-the-cat-2001-2018/
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squarefoot
RIP Mosfet, sorry to read that. Cats are wonderful life (and lab) companions.
I also have a couple and had others I miss a lot. All of them had their
personal character, habits and quirks, but invariably all of them have this
fantastic common trait in all cats: curiosity! I just love when they stare at
us when we're doing something; they don't interfere, just sit there and watch.
One of them apparently didn't like circuit boards; one day I was looking at a
circuit board I just finished soldering, then that cat came closer, looked
briefly at the pcb and started hitting it with his paws... that was hilarious,
just like telling me i sucked at soldering stuff.:) Probably there were light
reflections on the solder joints he didn't like, but whatever... He and
another one were also attracted by ultrasound, I discovered this when testing
a 40KHz transducer connected to the signal generator: as soon as I hit the
transducer resonance the cats rushed in the lab from 2 rooms away meowing...
apparently they can hear 40KHz from distance but also totally ignore you when
you call them a meter away. I just love those animals!:)

Get a new one soon, there are countless of them in need of someone taking
care!

~~~
ianai
Apparently they can’t hear male voices. Their hearing is sensitive to higher
frequencies than most male voices and the usual human range. I usually chirp
or make other high pinched noises to get their attention-though still get
ignored much of the time, of course.

Also apparently they’ll attack whats in our hands as they think they’re
helping us hunt.

They really are great. I was lucky to have a cat part of my life for 2 months
shy of 20 years. I learned a lot from him and still miss him absolutely every
day. He knew many human words - would come running and even let us hold him up
to swat at whatever bug was flying around, if needed.

~~~
VLM
Scientific resources online seem to disagree about sound range, which is both
wider and more sensitive than human hearing or voices.

[http://www.lsu.edu/deafness/HearingRange.html](http://www.lsu.edu/deafness/HearingRange.html)

Cat sensitivity is a good 6 dB more sensitive so even if they're peakier in
treble than humans, they still hear human males from further away than humans
can hear them. Somewhat intuitively this makes sense, lots of human powered
evolution to make dogs work well with males would force excellent hearing of
male voices.

Also you can run a reasonably intelligible for all voices telephone service
off 300 to 4000 hz for a century or so, so no point debating 50 hz cutoff vs
75 hz or whatever, its vastly wider band than telco standards either way.
Something kids under 30 will never experience is before digital vocoders and
high bit error rate cell phones, telco voice service was somewhat hi-fidelity
almost AM radio sound quality. Maybe someday voice communication will be that
high quality again.

Cats of course are very intelligent and can train humans to do all kinds of
stuff that is likely very amusing to cats, as per the anecdotes of them
training their humans to perform in singsong voices and whatever.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
As my gf said - cat fascinated by laser pointer => human fascinated by cat.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
More than an echo of Montaigne's famous quote, "when I am playing with my cat,
how do I know she is not playing with me?"[1]

1:
[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne#Book_II](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne#Book_II)

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shortoncash
Sorry for your loss, adafruit.

I have not developed a single line of code without a cat by my side for 11
years now. While they occasionally walk all over my keyboard, they are more
effective than the Apple Watch at getting me to stand up, walk around, and
interact with the world. Cats are truly great; their antics definitely spur
engineering creativity.

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bittermang
Would it be inappropriate to ask for the black banner, in recognition of
Mosfet?

Just reading the article, you can tell what a pillar of love he was for
everyone at Adafruit. I'm sitting here crying for a cat I never met, because I
can feel the love for him bleeding through my screen. He was a hell of a guy,
and a hell of a friend to everyone he knew.

If we can give a Britsh navy cat (Simon) a medal in recognition for his
service, then I say we can also respect and give tribute to Mosfet as a great
developer and hacker, in his own cat way.

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Santosh83
He is visually indistinguishable from several blacks I've had over the years.
They have wonderful personalities, and I can't imagine what led people to
think them ill omens. Lovely story, and am sure he will live on in the hearts
and minds of everyone who knew him. :-)

~~~
nkrisc
I adopted my two nearly all black tuxedo cats after learning that black cats
get adopted less often because people think they're bad luck. If they won't
then I'll just have to adopt all the black cats.

~~~
wlesieutre
I've heard this before, but when I've adopted my cats I didn't see a
particularly large number of black cats at the shelters. Last time there was
maybe 1 of 15, and he was in a brother/sister pair that wanted to be adopted
together (otherwise I might have taken him!). Maybe it's a regional thing? Or
maybe my experience is unusual.

Similarly unconfirmed reports from twitter that the Black Panther movie has
emptied shelters of all of their black cats. I can believe that pretty easily.

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sixothree
Back in the days of CRTs, I had a cat named Trouble. She would sleep on top of
my 15" Monitor. Friends and family would invariably remind me how I shouldn't
let this happen. This monitor I got for free lasted for years being Trouble's
favorite spot.

Trouble disappeared never to be seen again. And within a month the monitor
stopped working.

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kaeluka
If it wasn't for the cats we had when I was a kid, I'd be a different person
today :')

~~~
perfect_kiss
same 4 myself :3

my 1st cat was killed by neighbor's dog when I was 4 years old

life never was the same since then

~~~
kaeluka
I'll never forget the day my mother called to tell me that their cat had died
in an accident, suffering. I was (technically) grown up then, and it was many
years ago, but it still hurts. Writing this hurts :(

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dwyerm
I am the tiniest bit disappointed that Mosfet didn't have three legs.

~~~
tesseract
Mosfets are 4-terminal devices!

~~~
cristoper
But one of the terminals is called "body"...

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pasbesoin
Suddenly makes me think of Heinlein's "The Door into Summer".

