Cliff Stoll makes glass Klein bottles, which are a nifty topological curiosity. He sells them on his website and also on Amazon. This month, a company gamed Amazon's rules about trademarks and took over Stoll's listing for Klein bottles and started selling a blackhead removal device. — Read the rest
Cliff Stoll (previously) is a computing legend: his 1989 book The Cuckoo's Egg tells the story of how he was drafted to help run Lawrence Berkeley Lab's computers (he was a physicist who knew a lot about Unix systems), and then discovered a $0.75 billing discrepancy that set him on the trail of East German hackers working for the Soviet Union, using his servers as a staging point to infiltrate US military networks.
Twitter's openness is its strength, and also its weakness: the ease with which new accounts can be created makes it into an amazing tool for free expression, and also a perfect venue for vicious harassment (see also); but Instagram (a division of Facebook, the home of the walled garden) has announced a suite of anti-harassment tools that seem like they'd be compatible with Twitter, raising the obvious question: why hasn't Twitter already deployed them?
It turns out that folding a pizza slice lengthwise to improve its rigidity is a great example of the "Remarkable Theorem" by Gauss. Cliff Stoll explains.
In 1993, I started a radio station on the Internet, engaging in activities that later became known as podcasting and webcasting. I'm pleased to say that I've finished uploaded the archive of Internet Talk Radio to the Internet Archive.
I ran the radio station from 1993-1996, and it was an exciting time on the Internet. — Read the rest
Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes, "In 1993, I started a radio station on the Internet, engaging in activities that later became known as podcasting and webcasting. I'm pleased to say that I've finished uploaded the archive of Internet Talk Radio to the Internet Archive. — Read the rest
The Evil Mad Scientists were presented with a challenge: inscribe one of Cliff Stoll's hand-blown Klein bottles, an object of surpassing beauty and odd topology. They modified an Eggbot plotter to etch the surface of a Klein bottle with a diamond engraver attachment.
This may be the largest Klein bottle (lovely multilingual dissonance there!) ever made. Klein bottles are basically Moebius strips with one extra dimension — bottles that have one continous volume without any "inside" or "outside." This Klein bottle was made by Cliff Stoll (who wrote the classic true-cybercrime thriller The Cuckoo's Egg) who runs the Acme Klein studio in the East Bay. — Read the rest
What do you get when you extrude a Mobius strip into the third dimension? A fractional-dimensional object with zero volume: a Klein Bottle! And who manufactures and sells the world's finest Klein Bottles? Hippie-cum-Physicist-cum-Sysadmin-cum-International Crime Fighting CyberSleuth-cum-Author, Cliff Stoll. What a wonderful freak! — Read the rest
