Conditions of ACME's Unconditional Guarantee | Hacker News Reader

Conditions of ACME's Unconditional Guarantee

kleinbottle.com

249 pointsandrew_eu133 comments

I just ordered one of these recently! Last week, I finished reading "The Cuckoo's Egg,"[0] about a computer espionage case in the late 1980s (great book, by the way.) Afterwards, I was looking up the author's information, and found the klein bottle website, and videos with Numberphile.

Cliff actually sent photos of the klein bottle I ordered as it was being packaged up for shipping! Lots of humorous tidbits hidden all around the website. Worth taking a few minutes to explore around.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg

Wasn't that an awesome story? I enjoyed the PBS Nova documentary too, with reenactments starring real people from the story.

Btw, if you like interesting people with wide-open minds who also sell stuff from their fun and quirky websites, I can share a few others:

http://www.constructingtheuniverse.com/

https://www.denniswoodruffshow.com/

https://www.grand-illusions.com/

And as a great HN tie-in, The Cuckoo's Egg actually mentions Paul Graham and Robert Morris, two of YC's founders, in its last chapters.

Cliff, if you're still hanging around the thread, I want to thank you for this Klein bottle I got over a decade ago, back when I was a mere math undergrad. [1] Despite a number of close calls and myriad stories about strange objects getting trapped in it, it's maintained its structural and multidimensional integrity over the years. Thank you again!

[1] https://i.imgur.com/vlkIcKu.jpg

I sell software and have for many years, and I dont advertise it but I always give 100% money back to any unhappy customers (granted there is very few of them, for the last 2 years I have had one). Usually if someone mails me expressing unhappiness, I start by giving them a full refund even if they dont ask for it, then I mail them to tell them that I have refunded them, usually i let them keep the license, and then I try to engage with them to fix the problem.

Usually when this happens, its well worth the license fee to figure out whats wrong to improve the product, and the customer is eager to help.

Oh, but I understand what you're saying, Solaar. You make your software to solve problems and make situations better and people happier -- if that doesn't happen, you'd way rather simply refund their money.

Yes. I think its 3 fundamental objectives:

-I want people who use my product to be happy with it.

-If they are not, I dont want them bad mouth me.

-When someone is unhappy, that an excellent opportunity for me to learn, so I want to incentivize my customer to engage with me in a productive and not antagonistic way.

This seems like an excellent way to run a business for all involved.

I try!

Where can I learn about the software you sell?

It should be this one: https://www.quelsolaar.com/ministry_of_flat/

The main headings break off the viewport in mobile, should be a simple fix :)

A software product would be different since it would have much higher margins.

What exactly is up with the name “ACME”?

I remember as a kid there was an ACME in my town which was one of a chain of grocery stores, but in Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons it was a mail-order company that would send Coyote all kinds of crazy devices (which the real world ACME did not tend to have on hand).

Now, as an adult, there’s a Theatre company in my city called ACME and it’s also the name of a standard for requesting SSL certs, and now this guy has a joke about his Klein bottles being made by ACME.

So what’s up?

ancient greek: ἀκμή

It means "summit, zenith, peak, pinnacle" and has a history of being used as a business name that doesn't convey much more than "the best". It has the advantage of showing up early in alphabetical listings (like phone books) but seeming more sophisticated than, say, "A Plus" or "AAA". So in mid 20th century America, "Acme" would be an obvious choice for a generic company name. According to Chuck Jones, that's why it was used in Looney Tunes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_Corporation#Warner_Brothe...

Most recent uses of "Acme" are probably influenced by Looney Tunes.

ETA: In case it's not clear, it's not an acronym/initialism, although it's sometimes confused with one or given meaning as a bacronym.

The initialism I've heard is "A Company that Makes Everything". The meaning of "summit, zenith, peak, pinnacle" was new to me. TIL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_etymology

Any of the new corps registering in Walla Walla (Washington)?

basically, much of western civ idolizes greek culture and embeds its concepts in a very subtle way. acme means "the best".

Twenty five years ago, I couldn't think of a good name for a klein bottle company/hobby, and my wife said, "Acme". It stuck (and so did she).

This man has just given me half an hour of pure delight. I haven't laughed this much with unadulterated joy since I was a little girl. His enthusiasm and happiness and weltanschauung are contagious!

I'll never pass up an opportunity to proclaim that someday I hope to be as excited about something as Cliff Stoll is about everything.

To help others:

Welt·an·schau·ung: a particular philosophy or view of life; the worldview of an individual or group.

Also:

speicherverwaltung -- memory management.

Learned it from the "spvw" abbreviation in CLISP sources.

Hmm, how can I tie this ridiculous digression back to the topic? Oh, I got it: the original author of CLISP is also named Stoll.

He is no different in person. Don't miss his warehouse complete with forklift:

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

Well, I think he's different in person...

I wonder if the downvoters realise who they’re downvoting.

They never do. And the person they are downvoting is much too polite to point it out!

Oh, hi! I remember seeing the above video one of the previous times the Klein bottle was submitted here, and telling myself that I definitely need to do an order and pickup the next time I'm in the Bay Area (it's around 8,500 miles from where I'm at).

Hopefully that'll be possible once the pandemic passes!

If I say... buy a bottle from you would you autograph it for me? You’ve been elevated to the position of rockstar in my little corner of the world. It is only fitting for an autograph to follow. :)

I do sign those Kleinbots, although it kinda slows me down (it's hard to write with a sharpie on a compound curve). So order it a few days from now - when I have more free time - and tell me in the order comments.

(at the moment, this Hacker News squib has resulted in a veritable tsunami of Klein bottle orders -- over a dozen -- and I'm getting kinda backlogged. Looks like I'll be working tonight & tomorrow. And it's my turn to wash the dishes tonight...)

Oof! That sounds tiring. I’ll hold off on ordering. :)

I have a ton of questions though, is there some way to reach you? (I’ll wait to ask these too!)

Sure - I'm Kleinbottle / a/ t' kleinbottle -dawt- com

But again, I"m kinda buried in work right now. And I know way less than you think I do. (at least my wife tells me something like that...)

"One sided, at best"

Even better, order it a few days or weeks ago, before it hit HN! Then you will have a story you already told to your friends.

That mini forklift robot is the cutest thing I've seen in a while!

Many companies put a lot of effort into sales, because they are interested in a family of two-sided paths in the transaction space T, where one half-edge

    d : I -> T

is a continuous function d from the unit interval I = [0,1] to T, representing delivery, and the other half-edge

    p : I* -> T

is a continuous function p from the conjugate unit interval I* = [1,0] to T, representing payment.

Somehow it feels fitting that ACME instead puts a lot of effort into carrying inventory, where the single half-edge, o, representing on-premises inventory, is the identity on T.

It's fun to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg as well as watch the video made about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTx9h3Sm29I)

Once, at the Maker Faire, a guy walked up to me and showed enthusiasm for my exhibit (a solar telescope). He looked familiar, and I recognized him as Cliff Stoll.

Yup!

Many years ago- like fifty five - I worked at a museum that had a solar telescope. I had the wonderful summer job of doing sun-shows for the public. Beyond learning about sunspots, prominences, flares, and H-alpha filters, I learned how to speak to the public on a technical subject. How to keep kids' attention even though the subject may be out of their domain.

That summer job eventually led me to working at the solar observatory at Kitt Peak and was the start of my becoming a planetary astronomer.

So seeing your solar telescope brought back delightful memories and the happy feeling that someone else is discovering things that I once knew.

My smiles back to you, even in this week of solar minimum.

Thanks, Cliff. I kept finding solar interesting, so I've built an alt-az mount that points at the sun continuously, with the goal of capturing sunpots moving over time. Unfortunately, we've been in a bit of a solar minimum for a while, so there isn't much to see. But it's been a great maker project. H-alpha is one of the next things I want to try.

Well worth your time, Dekker!

Our H-alpha filter was a "quartz birefringent monochrometer" -- it used a stack of calcite & quartz polarizing filters to get 2 or 3 angstrom bandwidth. Had to be temperature controlled and treated with white gloves. But oh what views of prominences!

ps - we used to call the entrance pupil on a spectroscope a "dekker" because you could choose different slit-widths. I remember being praised by a real astronomer (Helmut Abt) for knowing what this was...

I bought one of these the last time this was on HN.

If you are on the fence about buying one I would recommend doing it for the following reasons:

- Klein bottles are cool

- Klein bottles are great conversation pieces

- Buying things from Cliff is an experience unto itself

Seriously, if only all retail experiences were as personalized and enjoyable as buying from ACME Klein Bottle is.

My favorite Cliff Stoll quote:

> customer service is easy when you run a zero volume business

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831394

Cliff Stoll is a pretty funny guy. He also wrote a fascinating book about tracking hackers back in the day.

Seconded! It gives very good flavor of life working at Berkeley and living there, and also the Internet of the day: https://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espiona...

I read this book shortly after he wrote it. I was a junior engineer at a big company, and the final chapter (on humans being the weakest link in computer security) inspired me to run "crack" on the password (shadow) file of one of our networked Sun workstations. (I actually wrote some code to re-create the shadow file from the output of ypcat because we were running NIS.) Crack managed to obtain about 20% of the users passwords, including root. I wasn't an admin on that network, so I informed the admin and his reaction was that he did not care if I had admin on his network. (I ran a few others already.) One of the cracked user passwords struck me as funny so one day in the hallway I casually asked what that word meant (to the owner of the password). The terror-stricken user froze and asked me why I wanted to know. Instead of recognizing the issues associated with using a dictionary word for a password, he went and complained to my manager. I got called on the carpet for "hacking his windows account." (Apparently he used the same password everywhere.) Fortunately my boss had a good sense of humor and nothing came of it. This was before the company even had a computer security policy. A year or two later, doing what I did would become a fire-able offense.

Hey everybody, I found Randal Schwartz's HN account!

;-)

(For people who weren't Perl hackers in the mid-late '90s, Randal pretty much did exactly that while contracting at Intel, and got 3 felony convictions and 5 years probation, and it took him 12 years of fighting to get the felonies expunged. Be very very careful "trying out" security related things at your employer, without very clear written instruction showing it was authorised - you do not want to be the guy in front of a judge saying "it's part of my job description as a sysadmin!" when your employer is claiming otherwise....)

I was defacto 'network admin' at one company. One guy I warned off the porn (dont care you look just do it at home on your own line). He got mad and yelled at the owner and got my privs revoked on the network by bullying one of my other co-workers. My boss took them back and then added even more just to make the guy look bad. Lesson learned. Just block it and do not say anything if you are not in authority to say so. If they complain 'you will look into it'.

Just to be clear, I obtained the passwords (including root) with "crack", but I NEVER used them. I did not ever attempt to log into any account that I was not authorized to use. All I did was to notify the actual administrator of the system about the security issues. The issues being both that even through "shadow passwords" was working properly, one could still obtain encrypted passwords by using "ypcat passwd", and that some users (including him) were using insecure passwords. The user who panicked and called my boss had just assumed that I accessed his Windows account. Oh, and there were never any hard feelings between us after that. We are still friends today.

I'd still be super careful doing that without explicit written authorisation. You "got away with it", not everybody does. (Although I'll note he admits to having made some "stupid" decisions which perhaps you avoided. And I'm guessing he knowingly or unknowingly pissed off someone powerful enough to push through 3 felony convictions, even if they were borderline enough to be completely expunged 12 years later. You never want to piss those guys off without appropriate in-writing justification):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1997/09/15/t...

"He installed a program called "Crack" that automatically guesses passwords. Like most tools, it's used by both good guys and bad guys, by those who abuse computer systems and by system administrators who want to find out whether users are avoiding such easy targets as plain English words. It's even distributed by the Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University.

He installed the program without telling his boss, something that he today admits was "stupid." But the program proved his point: Crack quickly guessed nearly 50 passwords of the 600 users of that system -- one belonging to a company vice president. Instead of reporting the company's security problem right away, Schwartz has said, he decided to continue testing. Again, he admits in hindsight, "stupid."

Other system administrators discovered the program and traced it back to Schwartz.

Schwartz insisted he never used the passwords for any nefarious purpose, and said he only acted because the company's lax security bugged him."

All very true! My story is from about 10 years before Randal's, but it was after the CFAA was passed so I guess I dodged a bullet.

Oh, and another good story from when I still had the same boss. A few years later I thought I would prank my office-mate (and show how easy it was to spoof email headers). This was back in the days with SMTP didn't have any security. From a hallway computer (not directly traceable to me), I composed a "You're Fired!" email from my boss to my office-mate. My office-mate had an east-European surname that was easy to misspell and I did. So the email bounced back to my boss and my office-mate never saw it. My boss knew right away who was responsible. He laughed.

A Cuckoo’s Egg! Fantastic book.

Cliff stops by here from time to time to comment as well. Here’s a recent comment thread he participated in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21830277

Sometimes. It helps when someone tells me...

There's an episode of Nova about it as well, that's up free online various places. Cliff is such a unique and energetic personality it's really entertaining to watch.

The episode is called "The KGB, the Computer, and Me". Here's one on YouTube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hTx9h3Sm29I

Hmmm -- that guy doesn't have grey hair! Or a cellphone. Or a web browser. I don't recognize him.

Oh wow thank you, I’ve looked for this for years. I am pretty sure this story and King’s Quest are the two major reasons I ended up in computer engineering.

I'm sure it's that way for quite a lot of us that are of a similar age. I have a really distinct memory of watching it as a child. I wasn't really interested in computers beyond the (rudimentary) games we had on ours, but this episode planted a lot of ideas in my head I'm sure.

Jason, I thought I was an oldster when I chased down that hacker and wrote about it.

  Thirty plus years later, I think of how young I was back then.  
 
  There must be some lesson in this, but I can't find it.

I would have been roughly kindergarten age at the time. That kid back then watching a face on tv would have never predicted the world would change in such ways that we'd be here chatting. As ugly as some things have gotten on the internet of late, that still fills me with something like awe, joy, and hope for the future.

I may only be 2/3rds your age, but every time I look back on life I feel the same way. I hope I always feel that way, because I think that means I'm continuing to learn and grow.

My friend, I am doing my best and really hope to catch up. But I always seem to be almost 600 days behind you. Please, can we do something to fix this? (Without any danger to either of us, of course!)

OH! You need a simple one-way time machine. You're welcome to borrow mine, but it seems to be out of order for the moment.

Wait a minute!

You have an out of order time machine? That is what I've been looking for all my life.

I already have an in order time machine, and it keeps going the same direction. I want an out of order machine!

Can we trade? Today, tomorrow, or yesterday.

I will give you a Klein bottle for it. And even do your dishes!

Hey Scope of the Stratos,

I'm unable to wait a minute. My time machine's out of order.

[edit: already answered in the parent thread!]

Wasn’t there an old Nova episode about this on PBS? I vaguely recall it, and have always wanted to rewatch as an adult. Just a fantastic (real!) story.

> I slightly guarantee your Klein Bottle for THREE MONTHS against any cracks or breakage, whether due to earthquakes, clumsy undergrads, or greasy fingers. Just mail us a fragment and $10, and we will send a replacement.

What a perfect solution to the fake defective / return problem!

> intentionally break klein bottle

> send it back piece by piece for more bottles

> repeat with new bottles for infinite bottles

Not a perfect solution haha

I assume you send a fragment and the receipt or something, otherwise you can smash your klein bottle into many fragments and the return policy becomes a bulk discount.

(Though this particular business seems low volume enough that you can probably easily deal with that problem so long as you don't have to scale it.)

To my surprise, I haven't found anyone breaking their bottle on purpose. (or on a porpose). One of the nicest things about running this micro-business is that, sooner or later, I'll meet most of the people who own a Klein bottle. The math & physics community is a wonderful place...

I’m not really part of the math and physics community, but I just wanted to say I’ve been delighted by everything I’ve ever seen that you’ve done. You make the world a more interesting and fun place.

Thank you, oh North Cutt!

It's both an honor and a joy to find myself a member of several impressive communities ... old-style hackers, math & physics jocks, people with solder-burns on their fingers, and left-coast techies.

I bought 2 to act as vases for the sweetheart table at our wedding years ago. Thank you!

How on earth did you get two porpoises onto a table?

Clearly, it wasn't on earth, as porpoises are native in the water. Perhaps he had the porpoises on a water table?

BRB: going to find a porpose...

> WARNING! Acme constructs each Klein Bottle from genuine Baryonic matter. Do not allow your Acme Klein Bottle to come in contact with antimatter or unpredictable results may occur.

Funny, the Pierson's Puppeteers have a similar warning for their General Products hulls.

Cliff Stoll has appeared on the Numberphile YouTube channel dozens of times, and they're all informative and hilarious:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWJeBhzCJ_JX...

He pops in here from time to time as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CliffStoll

A careful reading of the comments indicates he has arrived!

He also has an great warehouse setup in his crawl space.

https://hackaday.com/2015/06/24/crawlspace-warehouse-include...

Really impressive guy.

Can second this. I found this highly worth the watch and I think about this weekly.

ANd I can third this comment. I actually use the robot daily -- it's entirely utilitarian. Houses are small in Berkeley/North Oakland, and I've long outgrown my closet (and two kids & m'wife in a 2 bedroom house made for very tight quarters). So I the crawlspace became storage for zero-volume manifodls.

Didn't take long before crawling around caused backaches - and thus, the mother of invention visited me in the guise of an idea of a remote controlled forklift.

Cheers to all, -Cliff

https://www.kleinbottle.com/cartoons_and_limericks.htm

From the limericks page:

Three jolly sailors from Blaydon-on-Tyne

They went to sea in a bottle by Klein.

Since the sea was entirely inside the hull

The scenery seen was exceedingly dull.

That’s not a limerick, though. A limerick has 5 lines, for example:

There once was a young lady called Bright

Who travelled much faster than light

She left one day,

In a relative way,

And returned on the previous night!

To be fair, the heading on the page is "One sided verses & limericks:" and covers a wide spectrum of poetical types.

Yeh I know its not a limerick. I have seen a version of this as a true limerick in a book of 'science humor'. Looked for it but can't find. Every version online is this non-limerick version, presented as a limerick. I will update if I find the original.

Found the book! Poem is on p46, together with a cute illustration. Turned out I imagined it was a true limerick after all. But a fun book nonetheless.

https://books.google.com.vn/books?id=UGGhM2XKE_0C

The book is: Cooper W. A random walk in science. CRC Press; 1973. Surprisingly high citation index (58).

It’s ok - I got to nit pick and sneak a physics joke into HN, so all good.

Thanks for the link to the book, that is fun.

I wrote a limerick in third grade, when my regular teacher kicked me out of class and sent me to Mrs. Spencer's Workshop, where we got to do our own projects.

It wasn't a great limerick, and Mrs. Spencer had to help me with it:

There was a young lad from Dunn School

Over books with good looks he would drool

The books got so soggy,

They were fed to the doggie!

That poor young lad from Dunn School

After that unauspicious start, I went on to drawing maps of freeway interchanges. When I finished those, I decided I wanted to make a printed circuit board.

I figured I needed a kitchen cutting board (for the "board" part), a sheet of copper, some electrical tape to act as resist, nitric acid to etch away the unmasked parts of the copper, and a fish tank to hold the nitric acid.

So Mrs. Spencer got me all of those! I laid out the tape on both sides of the copper sheet and dunked it in the tank of nitric acid. We watched the copper dissolve into the acid, and there were the traces for my circuit board.

Of course we didn't need eye protection. We were all immortal and invulnerable in those days.

It was the most awesome third grade class ever!

This reminds me of the old Lindsay Publications reprint of Procedures in Experimental Physics from 1938.

https://gingerybookstore.com/product143.html

I believe it's only available used at this point, but:

"Chapters include: laboratory glass blowing, laboratory optical work, technique of high vacuum, coating of surfaces by evaporation and sputtering, the use of fused silica, electrometers and electroscopes, Geiger counters, vacuum thermopiles and the measurement of radiant energy, optics, photoelectric cells and amplifiers, photography in the lab, heat and high temperature, notes on the materials of research, notes on the construction and design of instruments and apparatus, and molding and casting."

https://archive.org/details/ProceduresInExperimentalPhysics

Very cool! Quality on that scan is great.

It's birdwalking a bit, but you posting that also made me check to see if Internet Archive has early editions of Vogel's Practical Organic Chemistry, and they do!

Another really cool blast from the past.

https://archive.org/details/Practical_Organic_Chemistry_Voge...

From Goldstein's Mechanics textbook, Jabberwocky of

  "The polhode rolls without slipping on the herpelhode in the invariable plane"

   (did I remember it right?)

I have no idea how you pulled that one from the cobwebs of undergrad!

I bought my parents one of the Klein bottles. It is really fun to hold something so useless yet interesting. I also thoroughly enjoyed the service provided. I received a complete inspection report, and the bottle was carefully packed and diagrammed.

A colleague of mine purchased one of the Klein bottle hats, and they received some selfies of Stoll wearing it in his garden right before shipment :-)

Yep -- but the reason isn't what you may think. Whenever I send out a Kleinbot, I take some photos, so when something goes wrnong, I can figure out my missteakes. Oh, but that's how I learn, alas...

"One side fits all" :-)

Cliff is a funny guy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll

Um, I suspect that my kids may feel otherwise...

Don't sweat it Cliff. My kids have a low opinion of me too. Love your work BTW!

Here's a good one for you about the younger generation: “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

― Socrates

I received a Klein bottle as a gift. The box was covered in drawings by Cliff and the accompanying paperwork brings me as much joy as does my zero-volume container!

Which should answer others' questions, Foof: I have fun with this micro-business. And (I hope) the joy is reflected in those who receive a zero-volume, one-sided flask.

I have one of these in my living room, it came with a sticker and a nice note, and I highly recommend them.

And thank you for your kind note, Tipta Cek! May it last for many aeons....

His website is where I first learned the term "dihydrogen monoxide". https://www.kleinbottle.com/why_acme.htm

I got one of those as a birthday gift in grad school, and it's a lot of fun, even 10 years later. I used to fill (yes) mine with tinted water for added joy.

It's a giant pain to get anything out of them, though, or, for that matter, to clean them (unless you have a trick for it?).

You betcha, yew bet TeePeeTee! I use two magnets, each covered with chamois cloth. Even then, it's a challenge.

I don't own one, but as far as getting liquid out inverting the bottle and siphoning out of the bend seems like the easiest way.

I think that would fail because air wouldn't be able to get into the bulb. If you've got a tube for siphoning I think a better strategy would be to blow air in thus pushing the water out.

And, I'll bet, you've done some research in the nature of small ecosystems growing in almost-closed bottles...

I have a good story about Cliff and his bottles, and what happened when I tried to buy a number of them as engineering awards at my company (which we still do — the quarterly Kleins of Excellence). I’ve posted it before so I’ll just link to my prior comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21830277

I love the design of that site!!

Uh, it's from the original hardcoded html from the late 1990's. Every time I adopt a tool, it's dropped by the software company or the open source group disappears and the code slowly corrodes. Guess it's sorta the same with me, growing old...

I'm not a fan of math and barely understand what some of these jokes mean, but this is a truly wonderful site to read through.

La olimpiada iberoamericana de matematicas en Caracas en el anio 2000 tenia una botella de Klein como logo.

Este post me trajo muy buenos recuerdos.

Every product should have a website like this.

About that lifetime warranty. If I am clinically dead and they shock me back to life, you pay me for 2 klein bottles?

Wonderful low tech website, wonderful business and idea, wonderful sense of humor. Very tempted to order.

Just buy one. I guarantee you that it will be the most delightful online purchase ever (and if not, I'll reimburse you, just send a piece of glass from the bottle).

After I bought it, I kept everything, even the packaging.

This

>(at the moment, this Hacker News squib has resulted in a veritable tsunami of Klein bottle orders -- over a dozen -- and I'm getting kinda backlogged. Looks like I'll be working tonight & tomorrow. And it's my turn to wash the dishes tonight...)

This

I bought one of these the last time this was on HN.

And the joy of reading through this site just suddenly made me yearn for an xkcd style graph showing klein bottle sales over time since last post on hn complete with snappy punchline in hidden text.

It is worth it to pick it up in person, Cliff is a hoot.

These things must be a bitch to clean

Hey - there's only one side to clean.

Unless Stoll upsells an ACME 4th dimensional rotator unit?

(Limit 1 per customer. Subject to availability and export controls.

ACME regrets to inform its amiable clientele that a recent site visit to our manufacturer for the new Banach-Tarski Playkit has revealed that although the raw spheres have been delivered and are in-process, they are likely to remain on backorder for an unbounded amount of time.)

At the Joint Math Meeting, I set up a huckster table, selling Klein bottles. I put up a sign, "SPECIAL BANARCH-TARSKI TWO-FOR-ONE SALE". About the only place I could pull off that stunt...

Hi Cliff, I have two of your Klein bottles which I very much enjoy, but recently I've had a hankering for something without quite so many embedded Möbius bands -- have you ever tried to make a glass Boy's surface by any chance?

Smiles back to you, oh creator of forks!

I've tried several times to make a Boys Surface. It's really hard to do. Bending tubing around its own radius - really challenging. Easy to kink, difficult to get uniform. I've commissioned my friend Lucas Clarke and he's had encouraging results; alas but I've seen too many shards of 30mm diameter borosilicate tubing.

Will keep trying...

I have to say I immediately assumed his update time was fake until I kept reading.

"Cliff last updated this page on Sept 5, 2020, while worrying about California's forest fires"

Next step, create bot that pulls headlines and auto-updates timestamps.

Uh, you somewhat overestimate my abilities ... as well as my free time!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com