Came in here to post this. This guy is unhinged by the way. He came in to give a talk in a course I was taking at UC Berkeley and as he continued to ramble on he noticed the students starting to glance at the clock on the wall above his head. He went off on a half-baked rant about how clocks don't matter and we should think for ourselves or something, then he stands up ON A CHAIR WITH WHEELS and pulls the clock off the wall. This guy is not young obviously - I was standing under him ready to catch him if he fell and the whole class was horrified.
“Unhinged” is a pretty uncharitable description, and your “horrified” class sounds a bit closed-minded.
Another way to describe the same is “excitable, passionate, and non-conforming”.
But I would instead say “Cliff Stoll is a national treasure”. I’m super jealous of the middle school kids who got to have him as their science teacher.
Well I mean I'd call it being dickish but that's just me.
He's a perfect gentleman as far as I'm concerned. I aspire to keep form and force of character as he has this many years on. If anyone wants a pretty amusing documentary featuring him and a pretty good picture of his personality see The KGB, the Computer and Me.
A scene of him sitting next to a guy being proper and having coffee while himself is sitting with feet on the bench and a big icecream shake comes to mind.
I feel like the world needs more people like Clifford Stoll. He represents one of the last vestiges of the "old, weird America", from a time when "Think Differently" meant something real and wasn't a marketing slogan. Sure he's eccentric, but that's what makes him unique, and I tend to optimize for uniqueness when it comes to things like art, literature, music, and even science.
I read his book The Cuckoo's Egg when I was in high school and I found it vastly entertaining and enlightening. It's dated now but I think people could still get something out of reading it.
I saw him speak in the late 1990s. He was absolutely a character, but also a fantastic speaker. Nobody was looking at their watches at the (well-attended) talk I was at.
>He went off on a half-baked rant about how clocks don't matter and we should think for ourselves or something
I had a conversation recently with someone who was telling me how visiting Cape Canaveral didn't convince them of the existence of space travel. This comment is eliciting a similar feeling of despair.
It's a great robot! His remote controller seems a bit cobbled together, but you can easily use a $50 RC controller with a $5 receiver and an Arduino to control whatever you want with 16 channels, it's amazing!
I'm fairly certain his robot was designed and built before Arduino's existed. The barrier to building robots and electronics has come way down in the past 15 years.
Funny you should mention it— I built a line-following system into the forklift, using an Arduino: I put a row of 16 downward pointing leds on the bottom of the chassis; the Arduino sequentially scanned all 16 leds. A photocell detected reflected light from the floor, and fed this into the Arduino’s analog input. In turn, this let the Arduino decide which side of the line it was on, and how much to turn to get back on track.
But odometry proved a bit more challenging, and it turned out to be more reliable (and fun) to simply move it using a RC controller.
Apparently it uses the rest of the time to send and receive spam email. Someone needs to fix this for him, just PTR records, SPF records and those sorts of things. Close down the open relay...
I am sure it would help him have more time for more fun things if he had some kind soul fix the email aspect for him.
It is sad that 'keep it simple' only gets you so far.
12) My website looks old-fashioned because it loads faster this way and (mainly) I'm too lazy to rewrite it. I last updated this page on April 30, 2019 6:16 PM
Very based attitude. I wish more people were like him. The website is perfectly functional & readable and doesn't waste any resources.
Thank you Kenji! People sometimes ask to rebuild it, but then I’d have to learn html-5 to support it. I’d rather have fun learning differential geometry or octernions.
We got one of these for our calculus three teacher in high school. It comes with an extremely hilarious warranty card. I do not remember the whole thing, but it does say that they warrant that the Klein bottle does not contain any magnetic monopoles. If any are found, one can return the bottle for a full refund, which they will provide after claiming the Nobel prize for physics.
We at Acme Klein Bottle strive to create the finest nonorientable surfaces and hope that you will be satisfied with your new Acme manifold. For this reason, we are pleased to offer this UNCONDITIONAL GUARANTEE complete with these conditions:
I unconditionally guarantee your Acme Klein Bottle to be free of any defects in workmanship or workwomanship or workitsmanship or workgenderindeterminiteship 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.
I guarantee safe arrival. If your Klein Bottle arrives broken, call or send email and I will immediately send a replacement.
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.
I warrant each Acme Klein Bottle for a period of FIVE YEARS to be absolutely free of any magnetic monopoles. If you discover one, we will refund your purchase price right after you receive the Nobel Prize.
Furthermore, Acme guarantees 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.
Acme further warrants 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 OR YOUR MONEY BACK!
In addition, Acme provides this exclusive LIFETIME GUARANTEE: We guarantee that you will live your entire lifetime, or double your money back.
Acme's unconditional guarantee has the condition that we do not warrant any Klein bottle against the actions of cats, ferrets, or axolotls. We will NOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE for any incidents relating to these beasts of burden whatsoever in any form or spatial dimension.
All other warranties, express and implied, are null and void except during total solar eclipses. Purchaser shall have the option at his, hers, or its sole discretion, to try to collect on this guarantee. Guarantee void if a substantial portion of the Klein bottle leaks into the 4th dimension. The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.
I ordered one of these for my dad for Christmas one year, and as we live in the Bay Area, I opted to just pick it up from Cliff Stoll’s house. Guy was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met—introduced me to his family and gave me a tour of his workshop, including the robo-car he uses to retrieve the bottles from his crawl space. My dad got a kick out of the bottle but has probably since forgotten about it, so I think I got more out of the gift than he did!
I wish I lived in the area, I would love to meet Mr. Stoll. I only recently watched The Cuckoo's Egg, which is from the 1980s and which he is the star of. A tremendously interesting story for anyone unfamiliar with it who uses this site I am sure, he was basically the first person to really track international hackers and did so at a time when law enforcement didn't even know if any laws had been broken despite military computers being compromised and secrets stolen. What I also found surprisingly and interesting was that in the film, parts of it were filmed in his home. The exact same home I recognized from his appearances in Numberphile videos where I first found out about his klein bottles. He does seem like a genuinely curious person, with a zest for life that can only come from being terribly interested in everything, and those are often the greatest people to know.
It's funny, I've read "The Cuckoo's Egg," Clifford Stoll's book, probably twenty times now. I had no idea there was a documentary about it (The KGB, The Computer, and Me - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0308449/) until just now so thanks.
"CYBERPUNK: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier"[1] was pretty interesting related reading, as it covers the same story from from the other side. (DISCLAIMER: I read the book quite many years ago..)
Oh, yes, that is the documentary I watched. It was really great, getting to hear it from Mr. Stoll's mouth directly. He was much less enthusiastic than he tends to be in Numberphile videos, I imagine that might be down to the director of the film. It is available on YouTube if anyone cares to give it a watch! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcKxaq1FTac
I finally broke down and ordered one, and an hour later I got an email from Cliff Stoll with a long series of photographs of him packaging my Klein Bottle – including the packaging and invoicing, with my name on it.
Are you familiar with a mobius strip? A ribbon with a twist in it produces a one-sided band. A klein bottle is essentially like a levelling-up of that by a dimension. It is a 4D surface which is, just like the mobius strip, single-sided. If you were 4th dimensional, you could trade from the 'outside' to the 'inside' and back without crossing any boundary. Of course, the klein bottles you can buy or see renderings of are 3D embeddings of this, so they have to include a bit of self-intersection that wouldn't actually occur in the real 4D version.
I've said it in a previous thread, but these are the finest non-orientable manifolds on the market today, and as many posters in this thread point out, Cliff Stoll is an extremely nice man to buy them from.
Aww, thanks, oh Idol o’ Words. I appreciate the opportunity to be of service to our community. I’m astonished by how many hacker folk are also into topology.
One day in grad school, some of us decided we needed to do a road trip to Cliff Stoll’s house to pick up some non orientable surfaces. Cliff is one of the most friendly and gracious people I have ever had the good fortune of meeting. I think we chatted about everything from electromagnetics to astronomy to computer security in his backyard.
Whew - that spoutathon was 10 or 15 years ago. I had put together a 1-hour talk and just before going on stage, I learn that I’ve got 18 minutes. So, I did what I learned in grad school: talk fast and don’t give ‘em a standing target...
About 30 years ago I saw you give a talk at the University of Arizona, it was soon after that pbs documentary you were in about investigating the remote hacking. It was fun to hear you speak, and I'm glad you are still around doing fun things.
Oddly enough, my partner, who is a designer, asked me 4 days ago "what's that weird moebius wine flask thing you showed me ages ago?" I thought for a while and responded "klein bottle?" and sent her the link to your store.
Obviously, the popularity and desirability of Klein bottles follow a curve shaped like a Klein bottle. We're currently in the main volume stage, and will loop back through over the next few years.
You should graph your previous sales history. It will almost certainly be indicative of future sales ;-)
P.S. We really do love you Cliff, thanks for being you!
I very rarely comment, but I just wanted to say thanks for being awesome!
After showing my mum the video you did with Numberphile, she bought me one of your Klein bottles for my birthday. It's still one of my favourite nonorientable surfaces. ;)
Hot tip: Cliff only charges for the prime numbered bottles in each order (or at least he did, many years ago). I made a group order with friends and ordered 16.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadAnother way to describe the same is “excitable, passionate, and non-conforming”.
But I would instead say “Cliff Stoll is a national treasure”. I’m super jealous of the middle school kids who got to have him as their science teacher.
He's a perfect gentleman as far as I'm concerned. I aspire to keep form and force of character as he has this many years on. If anyone wants a pretty amusing documentary featuring him and a pretty good picture of his personality see The KGB, the Computer and Me.
A scene of him sitting next to a guy being proper and having coffee while himself is sitting with feet on the bench and a big icecream shake comes to mind.
Indeed. The man has more than earned a few eccentricities.
I read his book The Cuckoo's Egg when I was in high school and I found it vastly entertaining and enlightening. It's dated now but I think people could still get something out of reading it.
I had a conversation recently with someone who was telling me how visiting Cape Canaveral didn't convince them of the existence of space travel. This comment is eliciting a similar feeling of despair.
It's such a great design/implementation.
But odometry proved a bit more challenging, and it turned out to be more reliable (and fun) to simply move it using a RC controller.
Perhaps this is a small scale look into the future of the self driving car industry.
* Stereographic projection lamp: https://www.shapeways.com/product/WA5HL9UF3/grid-stereograph...
* Gomboc: https://gomboc-shop.com/
It warms my heart to know it’s still up and that Dr. Stoll is still at it.
I am sure it would help him have more time for more fun things if he had some kind soul fix the email aspect for him.
It is sad that 'keep it simple' only gets you so far.
Given his CV, that is sort of hilarious.
Very based attitude. I wish more people were like him. The website is perfectly functional & readable and doesn't waste any resources.
https://www.kleinbottle.com/guarantee.htm
https://www.amazon.com/CYBERPUNK-Outlaws-Hackers-Computer-Fr...
From 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10551590
I'm glad people like Cliff exist in the world, such a wonderful person.
EDIT: I just found out that he also offer the Imperfecto Rulers from Theophilus Measure Co[1]. The accompanying video [2] made my day.
[1] https://www.kleinbottle.com/imperfecto
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yUZTTLpDtk&
Smiles all around, -Cliff
Obviously, the popularity and desirability of Klein bottles follow a curve shaped like a Klein bottle. We're currently in the main volume stage, and will loop back through over the next few years.
You should graph your previous sales history. It will almost certainly be indicative of future sales ;-)
P.S. We really do love you Cliff, thanks for being you!
I very rarely comment, but I just wanted to say thanks for being awesome!
After showing my mum the video you did with Numberphile, she bought me one of your Klein bottles for my birthday. It's still one of my favourite nonorientable surfaces. ;)
All the best,
James