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The vet who first saw Maddy after we found the first lump just phoned with Maddy’s lab results. Dear little Madeline had an Eosinophilic Granuloma. You can google that if you’re really curious, but the short version is that it’s an unusual auto-immune system reaction often brought on by an insect or spider bite. She may be prone to these in the future, but if we find them early enough they can probably be treated with cortisone.

We are greatly relieved, needless to say.

We bought a cheap digital scale recently for weighing Zed. Zed’s on a weight-reducing diet and we wanted a means to verify that it’s actually working. The scale came with a better-than-average instruction manual (better than the average instruction manual for a cheap Chinese-made product, that is) which contains one very strange paragraph, which I will reproduce here verbatim without sprinking it with the “[sic]“s that it merits:

CALIBRATION

When to calibrate – calibration is almost never required.

If the scale is inaccurate, calibration may be desired when the scale is first set up for use, or if the scale is moved to a different altitude or gravitation. This is necessary because the weight of a mass in one location is not necessarily the same in another location. Also, with time and use, mechanical deviations can occur.

It’s been many, many years since either my high-school or college Physics classes, but I’m pretty sure that I remember that there is no such thing as “a different gravitation”, at least not within our universe. In fact, had you asked me 25-odd years ago, I could have rattled off the Universal Gravitational Constant to at least three significant figures.

Now, technically speaking, it is accurate that “the weight of a mass in one one location is not necessarily the same in another location” if you interpret “weight” to mean “what a scale says when you put a mass on it”. That’s why physicists et al use the term mass and not weight. But this variation is only relevant if you’re talking about moving the mass from the surface of the planet to far above it, like taking something from Cape Kennedy to the ISS with the space shuttle. I’m quite sure that moving something from, say, a sea-level freight dock on the coast of China to Boulder, where the official altitude is 5430 feet, would not produce a measureable change in its mass. Moreover, that change in altitude most certainly wouldn’t produce a change in weight that would register within the stated accuracy of this cheap scale (which is seemingly two grams, although it’s not clear whether the figure stated in the Specifications is accuracy or resolution, but I digress).

Wow, yesterday was a doozy for unpleasant news. In reverse order of the arrival of the news:

Michael Jackson died. Okay, yes, the guy turned out to be pretty weird, but he was one talented guy–maybe the most talented guy in pop music/entertainment, ever. He could sing, he could write songs, and man could he dance. As entertainment icons go he was as big as they get, then or since. I suppose if you are younger than about 40 you don’t remember what it was like at the peak of his career, when Thriller was busting records and Michael Jackson essentially defined pop music at the time. Consider that Thriller is still the best-selling album ever, which means it has outsold any album by The Beatles, Elvis, U2, or anybody else. It’s particularly sad that he died just when things were starting to look up for him: he had 50 sold-out concerts lined up.

Farrah Fawcett died. Okay, yes, she wasn’t as big as Michael Jackson but she was something of an icon of the 70s. I’m old enough to remember the poster but not old enough to have bought it.

Madeline, our dear little kitten princess, may have cancer. I found a lump on the back of her neck about a week ago, so we trundled her down to the vet. The vet shaved a teeny patch of her fur so we could look at the lump. At that time it looked like it might be a spider bite and there wasn’t much to do other that to keep an eye on it and bring her back if it worsened.

A few days later it was clearly getting larger rather than smaller. We trundled her back to the vet who shaved a larger patch. The one lump had turned into four lumps, the oldest of which had become raw. On the assumption that it was a spider bite the vet prescribed antibiotics to keep an infection from developing while the spider venom ran its course, and we went home with instructions to bring her back if the lumps continued to grow or multiply.

(As an aside, Maddy hates being given these antibiotics. If you’ve ever had to get medicine into a cat, you probably know that the best technique is to grab them by the scruff of the neck and hold their head back, because that makes their mouth open and gives you some measure of control over them. Maddy currently doesn’t have any fur on the scruff of her neck so this technique isn’t at our disposal. Our current approach involves me kneeling over her, holding her down by her front legs with a pair of work gloves while Tracie grabs her head and squirts the medicine into her mouth with a syringe. This is barely effective. Yes, she’s still a kitten who weighs just over four pounds. They’re impressively strong and willful little animals.)

By Wednesday we observed that there was at least one new lump, so back to the vet she went. (Incidentally, if you happen to have to care for an unusual medical condition in either a human or an animal, it’s tremendously helpful to take pictures of it with a digital camera. It’s far easier to compare the progress of something if you can look at successive photos of it, and your doctor or vet will be terribly impressed with your attention to detail.) The vet took one look at it and said “that comes off, tomorrow.” No more waiting and watching, time for surgical intervention.

(As another aside, there are actually three vets involved in this story. There are three vets at the clinic and we’re on a first-name basis with all of them, but for brevity I’m referring to them collectively as “the vet”.)

So Tracie took Madeline in on Thursday and had a long conversation with the vet in which the possibility that we were looking at a sarcoma was discussed, and Tracie related the discussion to me after she returned home. I guess the possibility of cancer had crossed my mind previously but I’d pushed it aside.

Tracie brought Maddy home later that afternoon. She was a little groggy from the anesthesia but not unexpectedly so, and today she’s pretty much her usual self–aside from having a big shaved area and a nasty-looking incision. She’s shaved from just behind her ears to just in front of her shoulders, and the incision is about 8cm long with big sutures holding it shut. Yes, I have photos of it, too, but you don’t want to see them (trust me) and besides a princess is entitled to her privacy.

So, now we have to keep her from scratching her sutures, keep her brother and Zed from messing with her, and keep our fingers crossed while we wait for results from the lab. The vet sent her collection of lumps off to a lab so that they can determine what’s going on. We should have results on Monday or Tuesday.

There’s a rather gorgeous time-lapse video of my favorite city here by a fellow named Samuel Cockedey. He has a website here which has a number of gorgeous photos from Japan. His “Streets” collection makes me–well, homesick isn’t exactly the right word, but it’s the one that comes to mind. There’s also another time-lapse video on his site here using music which is *cough cough* borrowed from the Solaris soundtrack by Cliff Martinez, my favorite film composer.

I just posted a dozen photos of flowers from our yard here. These photos span a month or so and hence include both early iris and more recent peonies.

Yes, sooner or later I’ll get around to posting something other than videos of cats. I’m afraid that’s not going to happen today, however.

By popular demand:

Chris brought this very cool video to my attention. I know nothing about Festo or why they make what they make, but they make pretty cool stuff, it seems.

I’m pleased (as always) to announce the release of Audio Damage’s latest product. It’s called Eos; it’s a high-quality algorithmic reverb plug-in. By “algorithmic” I mean that it uses real-time processes involving delay lines and filters and stuff rather than the convolution-based approach that has become popular in recent years. By “high-quality” I mean that, in direct comparisons with some rather expensive hardware (naming no names) it can hold its own. It also has a CPU load low enough that using several instances at once won’t be a problem on any reasonably current computer. All this for $49. Yes, it’s a real deal. Click that big picture up there to got to the Audio Damage product page where you can listen to audio samples and buy yourself a copy.

I’d like to mention that this is also the first Audio Damage product that contains a significant amount of work done by someone other than Chris and myself. We met up with a fellow by the name of Sean Costello some time ago, back when we were researching frequency shifters for BigSeq2. That product’s frequency shifter module was coded by Sean. In an unrelated conversation, I discovered that Sean has a huge amount of interest in, and experience with, reverberation algorithms. To cut to the chase, the algorithms in Eos were hand-built by Sean for us. It’s quite a pleasure that Audio Damage has grown to a point at which we can pay people like Sean to contribute their expertise to our products. So, big thanks to Sean!

The previous kitten video seemed to be well received, so here’s another: