This NOVA episode with Cliff is what got me interested in the Internet when I was 8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcKxaq1FTac
The man with 1,000 klein bottles under his house [video]
61–70 of 124 posts
Re: The man with 1,000 klein bottles under his house [video]
#62Ok, never heard of klein bottles before, watched the video and I learned about something new today. Awesome robot and storage area as well :)
But, aside from that, when I went to youtube to watch the video, the ad I had to watch was this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYhdbxj-yoI
First time I watched a youtube ad all the way through :p
Re: The man with 1,000 klein bottles under his house [video]
#63The klein bottles are awesome, but they are the least awesome thing about his under-floor space. That was amazing.
I confess that my first hope was that it was some kind of klein-bottle glassblowing robot bodged togetehr out of bits of scrap wood and insulated with glass-fibre.
The reality was almost as good though, it's a cute little forklift-bot, and appears to work really well for his use (although I suspect if he started stacking boxes on top of each other it would get a lot harder).
So, who's going to kickstart Kiva for your attic/crawlspace? :)
Re: The man with 1,000 klein bottles under his house [video]
#64Ok, never heard of klein bottles before, watched the video and I learned about something new today. Awesome robot and storage area as well :) But, aside from that, when I went to youtube to watch the video, the ad I had to watch was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYhdbxj-yoI First time I watched a youtube ad all the way through :p
Who the fk geo-restricts an ad?
Re: The man with 1,000 klein bottles under his house [video]
#65Cliff 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/
He has also written Cuckoo's Egg, a book about his hunt for hacker that broke into computer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg This was really fascinating read for a young nerd around very early 1990's.
It's still a great read today. This HN post led me to hand my copy to one of summer hires. I've certainly passed that copy around.
Re: The man with 1,000 klein bottles under his house [video]
#66Cliff 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/
He writes well. Check out the guarantees section (http://www.kleinbottle.com/guarantee.htm):
We unconditionally guarantee your Acme Klein Bottle to be free of any defects in workmanship or workwomanship for a period of ONE YEAR following purchase. If you aren't satisfied with your Acme Klein Bottle -- for any reason -- just return it for a refund or replacement. You pick up shipping charges. We guarantee safe arrival. If your Klein Bottle arrives broken, call or send email and we will immediately send a replacement. We 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. We warrant each Acme Klein Bottle for a period of FIVE YEARS to be absolutely free of any magnetic monopoles. If you discover one, contact us immediately and we will refund your purchase price right after you receive the Nobel Prize. Furthermore, we guarantee for TEN YEARS that any polyhedron spanning your unbroken Acme Klein Bottle will have about as many edges as the sum of its vertices plus faces. We further warrant for ONE MILLION YEARS that within a Euclidean plane, the square of a right triangle's hypotenuse will equal the sum of the squares of the two remaining legs.
Re: The man with 1,000 klein bottles under his house [video]
#67Definitely subscribe to Numberphile if you thought that was interesting. One of my favorite YouTube channels.
Re: The man with 1,000 klein bottles under his house [video]
#68Cliff 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/
He has also written Cuckoo's Egg, a book about his hunt for hacker that broke into computer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg This was really fascinating read for a young nerd around very early 1990's.
Can't believe I hadn't heard of that before. That's an amazing story!
Re: The man with 1,000 klein bottles under his house [video]
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rim of your bowl is the edge: it's a point where the curvature changes suddenly. But that's not the important thing: the important thing is that not only is there only no edge, but only one surface. Let's talk topology for a bit. A manifold can be thought of as essentially a flat and infinitely thin sheet. If you have a spherical manifold (and your bowl would be a spherical manifold), it has two surfaces: one on…
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…
Yeah but last time I heard, a Klein bottle being only a one sided surface can only be rendered in 4D space with the 'passing through' funnel not breaking or intersecting the curved surface and this can't be rendered in 3D space. Unless recently they've decided to relax that restriction. Nice model though and worth getting but I wonder how best to mount it in a display case.
Re: The man with 1,000 klein bottles under his house [video]
#70I went to Cliff's house a few years back to buy one of his bottles as a gift for my dad. He was just as effusive, welcoming, and excited for one visitor he'd never met as he was in the video.
I thought I was just swinging by to pick up the bottle and pay the check, but I ended up staying for about 45 minutes (because he just kept going!), chatting about the crawlspace, the robot, and life in general. He talked about eschewing a big career so that he and his wife could focus on making life great for their kids. And it certainly seemed to have paid off for both kids and dad: I've never met anyone who seemed to be having so damned much fun just existing. It was refreshing to see that it's totally possible to be driven almost entirely by intrinsic factors and still exist in the real world. He left an impression as being an all-around fantastic human being. The bottle was pretty cool, too.