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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 happin
by areoform 6y ago
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!
- JshWright 6y agoI'll never pass up an opportunity to proclaim that someday I hope to be as excited about something as Cliff Stoll is about everything.
- edoceo 6y agoTo help others: Welt·an·schau·ung: a particular philosophy or view of life; the worldview of an individual or group.
- kazinator 6y agoAlso: 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.
- stefan_ 6y agoHe is no different in person. Don't miss his warehouse complete with forklift: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU
- CliffStoll 6y agoWell, I think he's different in person...
- vermilingua 6y agoI wonder if the downvoters realise who they’re downvoting.
- Stratoscope 6y agoThey never do. And the person they are downvoting is much too polite to point it out!
- ValentineC 6y agoOh, 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!
- areoform 6y agoIf 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. :)
- CliffStoll 6y agoI 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...)
- areoform 6y agoOof! 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!)
- CliffStoll 6y agoSure - 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...)
- jacobush 6y ago"One sided, at best"
- Stratoscope 6y agoEven 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.
- 55555 6y agoThat mini forklift robot is the cutest thing I've seen in a while!
- 082349872349872 6y agoMany 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.
- dekhn 6y agoIt's fun to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg 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 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.
- CliffStoll 6y agoYup! 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.
- dekhn 6y agoThanks, 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.
- CliffStoll 6y agoWell 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...