Conditions of ACME's Unconditional Guarantee (opens in new tab)

Well, I think he's different in person...

Many 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.

That mini forklift robot is the cutest thing I've seen in a while!

Yup!

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.

Also:

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.

I read this book shortly after he wrote it. I was a junior engineer at a big company, and the final chapter (on humans being the weakest link in computer security) inspired me to run "crack" on the password (shadow) file of one of our networked Sun workstations. (I actually wrote some code to re-create the shadow file from the output of ypcat because we were running NIS.) Crack managed to obtain about 20% of the users passwords, including root. I wasn't an admin on that network, so I informed the admin and his reaction was that he did not care if I had admin on his network. (I ran a few others already.) One of the cracked user passwords struck me as funny so one day in the hallway I casually asked what that word meant (to the owner of the password). The terror-stricken user froze and asked me why I wanted to know. Instead of recognizing the issues associated with using a dictionary word for a password, he went and complained to my manager. I got called on the carpet for "hacking his windows account." (Apparently he used the same password everywhere.) Fortunately my boss had a good sense of humor and nothing came of it. This was before the company even had a computer security policy. A year or two later, doing what I did would become a fire-able offense.

Sometimes. It helps when someone tells me...

The episode is called "The KGB, the Computer, and Me". Here's one on YouTube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hTx9h3Sm29I

The initialism I've heard is "A Company that Makes Everything". The meaning of "summit, zenith, peak, pinnacle" was new to me. TIL.

Any of the new corps registering in Walla Walla (Washington)?

Twenty five years ago, I couldn't think of a good name for a klein bottle company/hobby, and my wife said, "Acme". It stuck (and so did she).

Yes. I think its 3 fundamental objectives:

-I want people who use my product to be happy with it.

-If they are not, I dont want them bad mouth me.

-When someone is unhappy, that an excellent opportunity for me to learn, so I want to incentivize my customer to engage with me in a productive and not antagonistic way.

It should be this one: https://www.quelsolaar.com/ministry_of_flat/

To my surprise, I haven't found anyone breaking their bottle on purpose. (or on a porpose). One of the nicest things about running this micro-business is that, sooner or later, I'll meet most of the people who own a Klein bottle. The math & physics community is a wonderful place...

I wrote a limerick in third grade, when my regular teacher kicked me out of class and sent me to Mrs. Spencer's Workshop, where we got to do our own projects.

It wasn't a great limerick, and Mrs. Spencer had to help me with it:

There was a young lad from Dunn School

Over books with good looks he would drool

The books got so soggy,

They were fed to the doggie!

That poor young lad from Dunn School

After that unauspicious start, I went on to drawing maps of freeway interchanges. When I finished those, I decided I wanted to make a printed circuit board.

I figured I needed a kitchen cutting board (for the "board" part), a sheet of copper, some electrical tape to act as resist, nitric acid to etch away the unmasked parts of the copper, and a fish tank to hold the nitric acid.

So Mrs. Spencer got me all of those! I laid out the tape on both sides of the copper sheet and dunked it in the tank of nitric acid. We watched the copper dissolve into the acid, and there were the traces for my circuit board.

Of course we didn't need eye protection. We were all immortal and invulnerable in those days.

It was the most awesome third grade class ever!

To be fair, the heading on the page is "One sided verses & limericks:" and covers a wide spectrum of poetical types.

Yeh I know its not a limerick. I have seen a version of this as a true limerick in a book of 'science humor'. Looked for it but can't find. Every version online is this non-limerick version, presented as a limerick. I will update if I find the original.

You betcha, yew bet TeePeeTee! I use two magnets, each covered with chamois cloth. Even then, it's a challenge.

I don't own one, but as far as getting liquid out inverting the bottle and siphoning out of the bend seems like the easiest way.

At the Joint Math Meeting, I set up a huckster table, selling Klein bottles. I put up a sign, "SPECIAL BANARCH-TARSKI TWO-FOR-ONE SALE". About the only place I could pull off that stunt...

Very cool! Quality on that scan is great.

It's birdwalking a bit, but you posting that also made me check to see if Internet Archive has early editions of Vogel's Practical Organic Chemistry, and they do!

Another really cool blast from the past.

https://archive.org/details/Practical_Organic_Chemistry_Voge...

Yep -- but the reason isn't what you may think. Whenever I send out a Kleinbot, I take some photos, so when something goes wrnong, I can figure out my missteakes. Oh, but that's how I learn, alas...

"One side fits all" :-)

A careful reading of the comments indicates he has arrived!

ANd I can third this comment. I actually use the robot daily -- it's entirely utilitarian. Houses are small in Berkeley/North Oakland, and I've long outgrown my closet (and two kids & m'wife in a 2 bedroom house made for very tight quarters). So I the crawlspace became storage for zero-volume manifodls.

Didn't take long before crawling around caused backaches - and thus, the mother of invention visited me in the guise of an idea of a remote controlled forklift.

Cheers to all, -Cliff

Don't sweat it Cliff. My kids have a low opinion of me too. Love your work BTW!

Here's a good one for you about the younger generation: “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

― Socrates