When I had the delight of ordering my ACME Klein Bottle, Cliff was kind enough to take it on a brief (if disappointingly 3-dimentional) tour of his home, and provide much appreciated updates on the state of his garden as viewed through the manifold. It warms my heart to see folks make time for silly little twists on what, in today's age, has become a rather cold and sterile shopping experience.
I have grand plans to eventually "fill" my klein bottle with a swirling potion solution, but those are stalled due to a lack of time and a lack of a suitable magnet array to get said potion swirling on its own. (The self-intersection foils attempts to use standard magnetic stirring sticks.) I'll post pictures if I succeed.
Part of what delighted me when I ordered my klein bottle was the surprise of the packaging materials. So if you want to be similarly surprised, don't look too closely at the images in this post!
> For you younger folks, this is a weird thing we lived through
Such an odd feeling to realize that such intense, shared experiences become completely foreign to more and more people as time goes on. It's weird how all of us are so fixed in the context of the year we were born. For example, I was born in the mid seventies, and to me the moon landing seemed like ancient history as a kid, even though it was only a couple years prior!
Guess I'm just commenting on the feeling that, as I age, things feel more and more ephemeral. Like when you're young it feels a bit like "this is how the world has been and should always be", anything that has happened before is just "history", but as you get older it just feels more like I'm just a speck in the timeline of the universe. Don't know if that's a good or bad feeling.
I teach at a university now, and I'm definitely crossing that threshold where people haven't seen, say, The Matrix because it came out before they were born. Dot-com. 9/11...
We're getting old. Do yourself a favor and don't do the math on how many years you have until you're 60.
I recently watched This is Us and there's an episode on the Challenger explosion. It shows kids in middle school watching the event and it was uncannily exactly as I remember the experience watching it happen in 8th grade.
Museums are a good place to put that energy/feeling. In particular, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View has a lot of, err, computer history. Going to museums about World War II is not remotely the same as having lived through it, but they help those who didn't understand what it was like.
There are three parts to history: ancient history, things you remember living through, and what the young folk think the things you remember living through were like.
(Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres: qui cum oleo coquunt, qui cum butyrum coquunt, qui cum adipe coquunt.)
I ordered one from Cliff 4-5 years ago and the whole process was delightful start to finish.. It looks like he has even added more stuff to the package since I did!
The bottle itself is only part of the whole experience. :-)
I have one of these. The fun part is, you can actually put stuff, or a liquid, in there. The entertainment begins when you try getting it out again. It's not as simple as it may seem.
Happy owner of an Acme Klein bottle here. I can confirm it has made me taller, more successful, and more attractive to all of the groups of people I wish to be attractive to.
... that or it's a fun conversation piece on my shelf. Perhaps both! =)
I have grand plans to eventually "fill" my klein bottle with a swirling potion solution, but those are stalled due to a lack of time and a lack of a suitable magnet array to get said potion swirling on its own. (The self-intersection foils attempts to use standard magnetic stirring sticks.) I'll post pictures if I succeed.