One Bit Communication

One issue that JMD and I deal with is feeding her unfriendly/borderline-psychotic feral cat Clyde. Our interactions with him are principally feeding him, and holding up a finger in front of him: he swats at it (if we’re lucky, without claws), and then runs away. Therefore JMD’s usual name for him, “Ya little bastid.”


Given JMD’s schedule, there are plenty of times when I’m leaving in the morning and Clyde is giving me plaintive looks and meows: “I’m sooooo hungry! Pleeeaaase! Feed meee! Pleeeaaase!”. Or JMD asks me via text message to take care of feeding him in the evening; I pop a can open and serve it up. So while I was at Tag’s Hardware, I figured out that technology developed for dishwashers could be adapted to address this problem:



Heh. Admittedly, this is a pretty convoluted way to communicate one bit of information. But hey, it works.