Yingster

Klein Bottles

A Klein bottle is like a Mobius strip, but is not bounded. It’s a manifold (meaning has no holes) surface with only 1 side. While you can’t technically create this object in 3D space, you can cheat by having a self-intersecting point. It’s a fun thing for people who are interested in topology.

I’m not a mathematician, but I enjoy learning about mathematical concepts. Over the years I’ve seen the Klein bottle come up from time to time, especially the glass representation created by Cliff Stoll. I remember first hearing about him in a video that was showcasing his under-house storage solution for his many glass Klein bottles that he sells.

I decided to buy one for myself. I had heard that the buying process was first rate, and that was no exaggeration.

Cliff himself emailed me to let me know the bottle was being shipped. Not only did he include a personalized, and very humorous letter, he included many photos of the very bottle I would be receiving!

After just a couple of days, my parcel arrived!

It included invoices, inspection paperwork, “topological propaganda,” instructions, an advertisement, and stickers. Each page is packed to the brim with mathematical humor, jokes, puns, and more. I couldn’t stop smiling as I read through it all.

I can’t recommend getting one enough. It’s an fascinating object created by an interesting person! Thank you Cliff for this exceptional experience!

https://www.kleinbottle.com/

Ideas I should have patented…

I have noticed that I have had some pretty good ideas growing up. Unfortunately, I neglected to ever actually pursue these ideas, thinking myself either incapable of completing or engineering these ideas, or because I simply forgot. Without Further ado, I give you the things I should have patented:

1. The scroll-ball

In the nineties, I got my first mouse with a scroll wheel. Such a novelty! So convenient for surfing the net, and equally great for working in Photoshop! Not long after having one, I thought it would be super to combine that technology with the already popular trackball, and make a super mouse that could scroll both up and down as well as left and right. Well, I never did anything with that idea, and 6 years later apple released the “Mighty Mouse.” I got my wish (but no cash… Bummer).

2. The touch-mouse

Once the “Mighty Mouse” (Now just Apple Mouse) was invented, I thought about how it was able to sense that fingers are present in either the left or right positions, thus knowing when to right versus left click. I found out that the principle of finger detection is the same technology they use for track pads on notebooks. I thought to myself that having a track pad on the top of the mouse instead of the scroll ball would be way cooler. There would be no ball to clean, etc. Well, Apple did finally do that too when they created the “Magic Mouse.” It also has multitouch capabilities as an added bonus!

3. No-Glasses 3-D Screen

Remember those cool pictures that moved when you changed the relative viewing angle? (lenticular animation) Well, that is because there are 2 or 3 images split up into vertical line segments, and spread across the whole area of the image with a prismatic lens on top which allows only one set of vertical lines to be seen at a time. Well, this seemed like a perfect technology to combine with the high-pitched LCDs. If 2 images (stereoscopic) were positioned in vertical lines and placed behind this same type of prismatic lens so that the left eye and right eye will only see isolated images, the effect of 3D would be produced. Well, I didn’t jump on this idea, and now it’s been patented and even demonstrated. This example is not exactly the same, but it uses the same principle involving a lenticular sheet, and augments it with 16 projectors.

4. The Digital Rubick’s Cube

Back in the day when I first learned to solve a Rubick’s Cube, I thought to myself that it would be quite convenient to have a a digital one capable of shuffling itself or solving itself. Well, many years later such a thing was created. It’s called the “Rubik’s Touchcube.” To bad I never saw it through to actually creating it. I must say however that mine would have been cooler…

I’m sure there are more, but this is good for now.

Terminal Tip: Drop Box

Where I work, we are often placing files from one Mac to another by placing files in each others “Drop Boxes.” (~/Public/Drop Box) This is a very nice system, however it does have it’s flaws. Not all computers seem to experience this, but for myself and others where I work, we found that the files retained the permissions of the user who dropped the file in the drop box instead of inheriting the permissions of the drop box, which would make the recipient the owner of the file. This isn’t a huge deal. It just means that we had to save a copy of the file, or get info and change the permissions in order to edit and save. My clever brother helped me by giving me a command to run in terminal that makes any file placed within the specified folder inherit the permissions. In this case it’s using ACLs (Access Control Lists). Below is the command.

sudo chmod -R +a "USER allow readattr,readextattr,readsecurity,list,search,read,execute,file_inherit,directory_inherit,delete,writeextattr,writeattr,write,append,delete_child,add_file,add_subdirectory" /Users/USER/Public/Drop\ Box

Be sure to put your correct user name in place of the word USER in the above command. I hope this helps someone who is experiencing the same problem.

Skeet Shooting

Have you ever been skeet shooting? It’s fun. Maybe it’s a guy thing, but having a gun and being able to blow up a little clay disc hurling through the air is just cool. It’s been at least 4 years since I have been skeet shooting. Needless to say, I was out of practice. My first round I only scored an 11 out of 25, and my second was 14.

For those of you who don’t know, in skeet shooting, the shooters take aim at small frisbieish clay things called pigeons, which are fired from the left and right. We take shots from different stations in a semi circular layout. We get 24 different shots, and one extra shot in case we miss one, totalling a perfect score of 25.

I went again the following weekend, and my score jumped from 14 to 17. So, I’m making improvements. Yay!. Well, if you ever get the chance, I recommend trying it out.