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

Oh, 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!

If 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. :)

I 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...)

Even 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.

Oof! 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!)

Sure - 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...)

"One sided, at best"

I wonder if the downvoters realise who they’re downvoting.

They never do. And the person they are downvoting is much too polite to point it out!

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!