73-Year-Old Clifford Stoll Is Now Selling Klein Bottles
O'Reilly's "Tech Trends" newsletter included an interesting item this month: Want your own Klein Bottle? Made by Cliff Stoll, author of the cybersecurity classic The Cuckoo's Egg, who will autograph your bottle for you (and may include other surprises). First described in 1882 by the mathematician Felix Klein, a Klein bottle (like a Mobius strip) has a one-side surface. ("Need a zero-volume bottle...?" asks Stoll's web site. "Want the ultimate in non-orientability...? A mathematician's delight, handcrafted in glass.") But how the legendary cyberbreach detective started the company is explained in this 2016 article from a U.C. Berkeley alumni magazine. Its headline? "How a Berkeley Eccentric Beat the Russians - and Then Made Useless, Wondrous Objects."The reward for his cloak-and-dagger wizardry? A certificate of appreciation from the CIA, which is stashed somewhere in his attic... Stoll published a best-selling book, The Cuckoo's Egg, about his investigation. PBS followed it with a NOVA episode entitled "The KGB, the Computer, and Me," a docudrama starring Stoll playing himself and stepping through the "fourth wall" to double as narrator. Stoll had stepped through another wall, as well, into the numinous realm of fame, as the burgeoning tech world went wild with adulation... He was more famous than he ever could have dreamed, and he hated it. "After a few months, you realize how thin fame is, and how shallow. I'm not a software jockey; I'm an astronomer. But all people cared about was my computing." Stoll's disenchantment also arose from what he perceived as the false religion of the Internet... Stoll articulated his disenchantment in his next book, Silicon Snake Oil, published in 1995, which urged readers to get out from behind their computer screens and get a life. "I was asking what I thought were reasonable questions: Is the electronic classroom an improvement? Does a computer help a student learn? Yes, but what it teaches you is to go to the computer whenever you have a question, rather than relying on yourself. Suppose I was an evil person and wanted to eliminate the curiosity of children. Give the kid a diet of Google, and pretty soon the child learns that every question he has is answered instantly. The coolest thing about being human is to learn, but you don't learn things by looking it up; you learn by figuring it out." It was not a popular message in the rise of the dot-com era, as Stoll soon learned... Being a Voice in the Wilderness doesn't pay well, however, and by this time Stoll had taken his own advice and gotten a life; namely, marrying and having two children. So he looked around for a way to make some money. That ushered in his third - and current - career as President and Chief Bottle Washer of the aforementioned Acme Klein Bottle company... At first, Stoll had a hard time finding someone to make Klein bottles. He tried a bong peddler on Telegraph Avenue, but the guy took Cliff's money and disappeared. "I realized that the trouble with bong makers is that they're also bong users." Then in 1994, two friends of his, Tom Adams and George Chittenden, opened a shop in West Berkeley that made glassware for science labs. "They needed help with their computer program and wanted to pay me," Stoll recalls. "I said, 'Nah, let's make Klein bottles instead.' And that's how Acme Klein Bottles was born."
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