I love Cliff Stoll so much... I hope one day to be as passionate about _something_ as he seems to be about everything...
If you haven't read The Cuckoo's Egg, I'd highly recommend it. It details his experience tracking down one of the first "hackers" back in the 80's, when he was a sysadmin for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
> I hope one day to be as passionate about _something_ as he seems to be about everything...
The last time I've been so passionate about something was when I was around 10 or 12. Since then I've trained myself to be (and act) not so passionate anymore, because it'll make you look like a weirdo to most people. However, it brought me to a point where it's hard for me to get excited about anything at all, not to speak of expressing it properly...
That's amazing-- I had both read that book and seen a few of his appearances on Numberphile, but I never connected the two.
This same phenomenon happened to me not long ago actually, when I discovered that two of my all-time favorite bands shared a guitarist (Greg Edwards of Failure and Autolux). Is there a term for discovering that two people you know of are actually one and the same? I find it to be a rare pleasure-- you can almost feel the mental connections linking themselves together, and afterwards the world feels like a smaller, more logical place.
I read it when it was first published, twice in the same week I bought it. It's was a really good story. Sadly I lost my copy, possibly due to lending it to someone.
Funny story. I saw this video yesterday morning, about an hour before my topology exam. One of the questions involved calculating the Euler poincare characteristic of a 3 fold sum of RP2. Unfortunately, I had forgotten the formula for the case of m-fold sums of RP2 but I knew that it was linear in m and that the Euler poincare characteristic of RP2 was 1. Luckily, I remembered a Klein bottle is homeomorphic to the 2-fold sum of RP2. Having seen this video and knowing the cell complex structure of a mobius band ended up being enough for me to derive the answer.
That depends on whether it has been seamed or has edgework. It's incredibly sharp if nothing has been done to it, enough so that merely touching glass edges can cause cuts. Glass is normally seamed before tempering, but that doesn't leave it perfectly smooth either. I've gotten glass splinters from it, along with finding edges that didn't get seamed well, though most sharp edges will break in the tempering furnace (this is why you seam glass prior to tempering). Glass splinters are as horrible as you might imagine and can take weeks to work themselves out, as well as being ridiculously hard to see.
So yeah, I don't recommend the practice if you're not sure, but it may be okay for glass that has had edgework done as this glass gets polished smooth, whereas tempered glass is probably okay, but not always safe.
EDIT: Looks like it's blown glass. No, that's not very safe.
You're probably right that the edge isn't so sharp, though I note that his finger was higher above it than it looked, but I wouldn't underestimate glass splinters.
Cliff is a wonderful, wonderful human being. He once did a series of free physics classes for middle schoolers in his garage. Learned how to measure the speed of light from him.
If you haven't read The Cuckoo's Egg, I'd highly recommend it. It details his experience tracking down one of the first "hackers" back in the 80's, when he was a sysadmin for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.