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. ;)
An ACME Klein bottle was my first purchase of a physical object from the internet, more than 20 years ago.
I was a teen, then, and my father was going to buy it for my birthday. At the time, it seemed wickedly crazy that you could just make a few mouse clicks on a computer and have a physical object delivered to your home. If I recall correctly, we had to send a credit card number by fax! We were really scared that something bad would happen.
A few weeks later we received the package with the Klein bottle in it, but unfortunately it was broken. It was just a small crack on one side, but thick enough that it leaked water when it was "filled". I remember being very excited and very disappointed at the same time. Then, I sent a mail to Cliff explaining that my bottle arrived a bit broken, but I could not really prove it (there were no ubiquitous digital cameras back then), just to inform him to try to make the packaging safer. He replied immediately something like "Oh, sorry about that! No big deal, I'm sending you a new one." And indeed he did. I was in awe!
To this day, both klein bottles are proudly displayed at my home, and I count them among my most prized possessions, together with a few old editions of math books. The chipped one is actually more visible since I am less afraid that it breaks! The good one, is reserved for running water experiments on special days.
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.
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.
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.
Heh, I found this site when I was an undergraduate and passed the link on to a senior topologist in the department on a whim; he was delighted, purchased a couple of them, and when I went for a postgrad studentship in the same department a couple of year later, he was on the interviewing committee. So thank you Acme :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I got my sister one of these a while ago. The series of pictures of the bottle being packed and shipped, along with (iirc) the handwritten note that it came with, were absolutely delightful. 11/10 would recommend and buy again. :)
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.
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...
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.
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.
Yikes! So HN is the cause of my Friday evening being so busy...
Smiles all around, -Cliff
Hi there Cliff, we love you!
blush
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!
Hey, Cliff!
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
Oh, man, this nearly brought tears to my eyes...
An ACME Klein bottle was my first purchase of a physical object from the internet, more than 20 years ago.
I was a teen, then, and my father was going to buy it for my birthday. At the time, it seemed wickedly crazy that you could just make a few mouse clicks on a computer and have a physical object delivered to your home. If I recall correctly, we had to send a credit card number by fax! We were really scared that something bad would happen.
A few weeks later we received the package with the Klein bottle in it, but unfortunately it was broken. It was just a small crack on one side, but thick enough that it leaked water when it was "filled". I remember being very excited and very disappointed at the same time. Then, I sent a mail to Cliff explaining that my bottle arrived a bit broken, but I could not really prove it (there were no ubiquitous digital cameras back then), just to inform him to try to make the packaging safer. He replied immediately something like "Oh, sorry about that! No big deal, I'm sending you a new one." And indeed he did. I was in awe!
To this day, both klein bottles are proudly displayed at my home, and I count them among my most prized possessions, together with a few old editions of math books. The chipped one is actually more visible since I am less afraid that it breaks! The good one, is reserved for running water experiments on special days.
Thank you Cliff, we love your glasswork!
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!
Did the same. Legendary.
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.
Me too, can't wait to watch it.
"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..)
https://www.amazon.com/CYBERPUNK-Outlaws-Hackers-Computer-Fr...
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
This is exactly why I love the Bay Area so much - the people.
For context: Cliff, who designs and sells these bottles, is also the guy who busted KGB hacker Markus Hess in the 80s.
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&
I’m not sure that my students appreciated it so much...
He also described his pursuit after the hacker in „The Cuckoo's Egg” witch is one of my favorite books ever
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.
Sure — the photos are as much fo me as you. When I make a missteake, I can look at the pix and see how to prevent the goofup next time.
I was impressed.
Wow that is fantastic. I can't wait for my break down, I mean Klein Bottle.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU
How am I more fascinated by his warehouse robot than the glass bottles.
It's such a great design/implementation.
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.
>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.
Thank you ! That really made my day !
and "Klein Bottles": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAsICMPwGPY
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.
Mobile readable version on the site:
https://www.kleinbottle.com/guarantee.htm
Heh, I found this site when I was an undergraduate and passed the link on to a senior topologist in the department on a whim; he was delighted, purchased a couple of them, and when I went for a postgrad studentship in the same department a couple of year later, he was on the interviewing committee. So thank you Acme :-)
Thanks right back to you, JJ! Especially, thanks for helping my kids with tuition. What goes around...
I want to show a bit of appreciation for a website that loads in 50ms. Thanks for keeping it simple, Cliff.
That’s because the site has been up and unchanged for about (if not over) twenty years :)
It warms my heart to know it’s still up and that Dr. Stoll is still at it.
> I last updated this page on April 30, 2019 6:16 PM
>> I last updated my brain on June 25224, 1950 03:15 AM
Sigh ... also because I haven’t changed much in twenty years.
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.
>Apparently it uses the rest of the time to send and receive spam email.
Given his CV, that is sort of hilarious.
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.
These are great! Similar mathematical toys/models that you can buy:
* Stereographic projection lamp: https://www.shapeways.com/product/WA5HL9UF3/grid-stereograph...
* Gomboc: https://gomboc-shop.com/
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.
From 2017, with contributions from CliffStoll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14014218
From 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10551590
these are made by Cliff Stoll, of cuckoo's egg fame.
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.
> But I would instead say “Cliff Stoll is a national treasure”.
Indeed. The man has more than earned a few eccentricities.
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.
I saw him speak twice. His sense of wonder is pretty unmatched.
>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.
They're not made by him anymore. A glassblower makes them. But he does the rest.
To learn about the operation, watch the Numberphile video, “The man with 1,000 Klein Bottles UNDER his house” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU
With an inventory robot Amazon would be proud of.
I was wondering about that the instant I saw his name in the footer.
I got my sister one of these a while ago. The series of pictures of the bottle being packed and shipped, along with (iirc) the handwritten note that it came with, were absolutely delightful. 11/10 would recommend and buy again. :)
I've ordered two bottles on different occasions. Cliff Stoll is a really awesome guy down to the personalized notes he sneaks into each packages.
I'm glad people like Cliff exist in the world, such a wonderful person.
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.
So, it is better to order them individually, then it's free!
Clifford on TedX https://youtu.be/Gj8IA6xOpSk
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...
I ordered one a few years ago. The whole experience was by very far the most delightful purchase I made ever.
Ok, I'll bite. Zero volume, one sided, non-orientable, what is this?
A klein bottle
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.
A lot of fun copy on this site!
I purchased one some time ago, and it was my most fun online shopping experience by far.
This is exceedingly delightful
Cliff Stoll!! Wonderful man
I bet Cliff gets an "HN Bump" in sales !
I gave one of these to a friend who loved it.
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.