Acme Klein Bottle | Hacker News Reader

Acme Klein Bottle

kleinbottle.com

276 pointsZeljkoS63 comments

Warm greetings to m'friends at HackerNews from an astronomer who's blushing from this attention.

Like most old school hackers, I try to explore ideas that keep me awake ... the "I wonder if I can make an x" where x may be a topological manifold, an arduino line-follower, a garden leaf moulded into ceramic, a Penrose tile pattern, an LTE geolocation algorithm...

And, as most of you realize, this Klein bottle microbusiness is mainly to have fun and stay busy -- a chance to fool with everything from math to glassblowing.

Best part, of course, is meeting math folk, students, computer jocks, and random visitors. To each, I hope, I leave the strong encouragement to keep exploring!

My warm wishes to each of you, on a sunny Sunday morning in Oakland, California!

-Cliff (who's typing with dough on his fingers, left from mixing up scones for breakfast)

I remember the first time I saw the video about your under-floor distribution system and all I could think was: I want that.

I have no product to sell or organize, but I still want that.

... perhaps some sort of underfloor cat organizer ...

The video in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU

Hi Cliff! I love these klein bottles and have always wanted ask if you'd consider trying to make one that can function as a chemex style coffee maker? Somewhat like the wine bottle but with an opening the right size for a chemex filter would be so cool.

This must also be the same Cliff Stoll of the fameous/infameous Hannover Hacker. So wierd to see the funny interconnections in the real world.

"The Cuckoo's Egg" is one of my favorite books and got me on the path of "understanding the problem for all it's layers" instead of correcting a bug.

How'd the scones turn out?

Cliff is one of the most warm and genuine people I've ever met. I ordered one of these for my dad and went to pick it up, thinking it would just be a quick transaction. I got a half hour tour of his workshop, storage area and retrieval robot and a nice chat about life, the value of family, and Klein bottles. What a great dude.

I was pretty much sold just on the notion of giving this as a gift, but now I'm truly, deeply sold. That sounds like a business I'd go out of my way to support.

I found some really cool making of photos and info on the Giant Klein Bottle page: http://www.kleinbottle.com/meter_tall_klein_bottle.html

Isn't it the same guy from numberphile videos?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AAsICMPwGPY

Yes, that's the same guy.

One of these was given to me as a graduation gift. Included with the order receipt were photos of him wrapping up the Klein bottle, holding it up and smiling with it, and the receipt was signed with a note saying, "Congratulations!" It's possibly the best present I've ever received! In case you see this, thank you Clif!

Because of this I read The Cuckoo's Egg, and it was pretty great too. What a cool guy.

Cliff is one of the original nerds, it's worth reading the whole of kleinbottle.com for the amusing anecdotes and jokes.

My favourite: http://www.kleinbottle.com/drinking_mug_klein_bottle.htm

The Cuckoo's Egg is excellent; I encourage all of my team(s) to read it as it highlights how attention to detail and creative thinking can unlock unexpected value (with the added bonus it's a spy story!).

I would add that the Cuckoo's Egg is perhaps the best narrative describing the early days of the Internet. If you want to understand how people originally used and thought about the Internet read this book.

While I had used BBS's previously this book was my formal cultural and technical introduction to the Internet

My warm cheers back to you, oh Light of the Rebos!

Having graduated, it's your hands and mind that we now depend on. I trust that you're using 'em to do wonderful things!

Cliff is an amazing guy. If you're in the Bay Area and looking for something to do, give him a call and ask if you can stop by. He keeps all of his merchandise in the crawl space under his house and built a remote-controlled forklift to bring it out. He has lots of interesting glassblown 3D shapes, Klein bottle hats, and so on, plus incredible stories.

Numberphile did a video a couple of years ago that featured the forklift in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU

Cliff is a really neat guy. I met and talked to him briefly once (at Dayton Hamvention, 20ish years ago). He's a really, really nice guy.

K7TA here ... you send me back to those golden days of flea markets and boat anchors. Whew!

FAQ 11 answer...

"My website looks old-fashioned because it loads faster this way and I'm too lazy to rewrite it. I last updated this page on March 30, 2017 12:54 PM"

Excellent. I really must order a klein bottle woolly hat.

For those of you who don't know Cliff Stoll, you need to watch this:

https://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything

Or read some of his books like The Cuckoo's Egg. He was honestly one of the reasons why I got into computers as a kid.

Interesting companion to this is Markoff's "Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier" [1]. One of the stories covered in this book is the same one as in Stoll's Cuckoo's Egg, but from the other side.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Cyberpunk-Outlaws-Hackers-Computer-Fr...

, and this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcKxaq1FTac

Is he really the same Cliff Stoll who wrote The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking A Spy Through The Maze Of Computer Espionage? It is one of my all time favorite books. I really recommend it if you haven't read it already. I didn't know Cliff Stoll also made other awesome stuff. He really seems to be an amazing person.

One of my favorite things about reading that book as a kid was typing one of the IP addresses for the White Sands missile range computers into telnet and getting a Unix login prompt.

Yep, that's him.

I have often said that someday I want to be as passionate about something as Cliff Stoll is about everything.

Yep, same guy. But I suspect that my wife and kids would dial down the adjectives.

Cliff, thank you for writing that book! It is what got me, like many others, seriously into exploring computers (in legal ways!).

It's really him? I loved that book as a kid! It was the first book I read that opened my eyes to the world of system administration, intrusion, etc. It's one of a handful of books that I still have on the shelf and loan out to the kids of any family friends.

Does anyone know where I can buy this an an e-book without DRM?

I think I have a copy, formatted as Mac Word on a 3.5" diskette, MFS format. I'll have to dig around my attic.

I have the book in paper (I just checked, it is right between Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, and Cory Doctorow's Little Brother :)), but I also managed to find an ePub version online. It has no DRM. If you are okay with that I guess I can send it to Sidnicious. I was going to say that it could save you the trouble of digging around your attic but since it's you for all I know it consists in playing with an R/C car equipped with a camera which doesn't sound like trouble :D.

What luck! My dad's been keeping our PowerBook 180c in a closet for a special occasion.

It looks like Apple, Amazon, etc. all sell electronic copies, it's just that they can only be read on approved devices, and only for as long as the company in question keeps running its licensing servers, and that bothers me.

I had one of these in college. It's probably still lying around my house somewhere. Admittedly, my storage organization strategy is probably biased toward objects composed of orientable manifolds, so it's understandable that I would lose track of it.

> It's probably still lying around my house somewhere

And equally your house is lying around somewhere inside it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU

It's worth reading the site text to get an impression of Cliff Stoll.

On one hand he's our people, ticking off many of the stereotypical but true geek attributes. He might seem weird to a some people, but I feel like I totally get him as a person even if I disagree with some (a lot?) of his ideas.

On his recent youtube videos he's the closest real life match to Doc Brown you'll find.

I do wonder how he's copyrighted a glass object representing a mathematical surface. Maybe it has to do with the fact that different projections can be made into 3d space, how do design and build the projection, etc.

Checkout is golden, it asks you for number of dimensions in your universe: http://svedic.org/TEMP/KleinBottleCheckout.png

No string theorists allowed? ;)

Spacetime would like to have a word with you.

This (quote) is what's holding me back from buying one:

> Not only are these difficult to fill and empty, but cleaning them is a real challenge. Since there's little air circulation within the Klein Bottle, moisture doesn't evaporate. Worse, you can't reach in with a towel. So you'll need to dry the interior surface using alcohol. I've had good luck with a pair of small magnets wrapped in cotton cloth.

My aunt gave me the Klein Stein for graduation (a klein bottle in the shape of a beer mug). It's actually not that hard to clean. You rinse it with water and then bake it in the oven at ~200F for an hour and you're good to go. It is a bit more involved than a normal mug but it's really not as bad as you would expect.

Those bottle are mostly decorative I suppose anyway

Just keep it inside a lucite display case like you'd use to display a model or figurine.

Here's a video[1] of Cliff showing-off a three handled klein bottle.

I like the bit where he says a two handled klein bottle is a torus.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIaihe8HGiY

I'm the proud owner of one of these, and he really makes the entire purchase process a special experience. From the personal email on order to the notes included (and fast shipping). Every house should have one. Or several.

I wonder if you could also get an evil kleinstein, were the handle connects to the outer chamber at the top and the main inner chamber at the bottom. Good yoke that.

I bought a few of these. They are quite cool, and the documentation is probably half the value. I Think I owe it to the universe to support this type of endeavor.

Thanks, Zafka, for helping with my two kids' tuition!

Your welcome!! I just watched your Ted Talk which someone here linked to.---

I would also like to give a you a big shout out for Teaching!!

   If everyone here followed your lead, the world would benefit greatly.

Ah yes, Klein bottles. When I was a child, I was assigned to Escher Elementary. It had a great math program, though I did have to walk uphill both to and from school.

Then I graduated and was assigned to Klein Bottle Middle School. It had a good reputation, but I could never find the front door. I had to transfer to Hyperspace Tech, which fortunately has a front door everywhere.

I remember Cliff giving a talk at Sequent in Beaverton. Two indelible impressions were the energy and enthusiasm that Cliff had ... and the person in the front row tossing Cliff something to eat every X minutes.

Felt very much like a hummingbird or something that had to eat 2X their weight every day.

Currently owning one of their Klein Bottles, I can say that it was a very personal experience. I live in Ireland, and I recieved 2 personal emails, about the klien bottle itself, and a letter with a few notes.

My klien bottle sits on my desk, and I couldn't be happer with

I thought a klein bottle is supposed to have walls with zero thickness -it's made of an idealized plane...

Ok, it's an immersion in R^3 of a tubular neighborhood of an embedding of the Klein bottle in R^4.

But be like Michelangelo and see the immersed Klein bottle inside the glass.

... but with an imaginary klein bottle you can own one without buying it; that's cheaper, isn't it?

You'd think so, but it's actually more expensive because you don't get the experience of buying a Klein bottle from Cliff Stoll.

Is this a late April fool?

No, Cliff is very real, I used to live a block away

(pinching myself) yep, I think I'm real. Or maybe someplace on the complex plane.

already posted two years ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9064180

Reposts are allowed, as per the current HN faq: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Particularly in cases, as in this one, in which past submissions had very little discussion. Or when past submissions are more than a year old.

Also, I would add as a personal opinion. These type of "cult" submissions that get re-posted at regular intervals add a lot of character to HN.

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