51–60 of 124 posts
His tiny robotic warehouse in the crawlspace of his house is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. Pure distilled mad science. He's like a living cartoon. I want to be him when I get old so very much!
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If you stick a cork in the bottom, his bottles have an inside and an outside. The abstract object doesn't, the 3d manifestation of it does.
I had to think about what that meant for a moment, as it's sort of part of the weirdness of the bottle. Really, putting a cork in it is probably closer to putting a lid on a bowl, no? It's just sealing the local minimum. (Maximum? I don't really know what the sign should be for this. Probably maximum, for enclosed volume, since I'm not sure if it's reasonable to talk about the topology having a minimum in this contex…
I don't think I can reason clearly about the 4 dimensional object, part of pointing out that a 3d manifestation does not have the same properties is me trying to do that.
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But with an ordinary bottle, the edge is the point (if I may), because if a bottle had no edge, couldn't it be said that has just one ordinary surface? So in fact, what I understand so far is: - a (hollow) sphere has two surfaces, one inside and one outside, and you can't connect one to the other (you can't walk from one to the other) - a potato, or a bowl also have the same properties: two distinct surfaces - a bott…
I think the confusion here is that you're taking what he's saying in terms other than those of topology. In topology, you deal with manifolds. Manifolds have no thickness , but they do have area. In topology, there's no such thing as a 'filled' sphere: a sphere in topology has no edges and an inside surface and an outside surface, much like a football. There are two ways you can make a 'bottle': you can deform a sphe…
Is it glass wool hanging down from his underfloor ceiling in insane qualities? I was raised to believe it's extremely dangerous to health, people crawling there scare me. Of course it's easier with forklift.
Are you sure people were being honest with you? Or were they trying to stop an inquisitive young person from grabbing a handfull of it?
I want a reality show about this guy, this is amazing!
Clifford's TED talk is quite entertaining too: https://youtu.be/dSGHZ4YHP54
Cliff Stoll in case people were wondering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll I have his original book my shelf, it was fascinating when it came out. His Klein Bottle company is here: http://www.kleinbottle.com/