Autographs — George and Brad Takei

 

George Takei spoke and signed books at an event in East L.A. this afternoon. After twenty minutes of one speaker introducing another who introduced another, with lots of thank yous, finally Takei answered prepared questions for about forty minutes, mostly about his latest books, They Called Us Enemy and My Lost Freedom: A Japanese American World War II Story.

There were hundreds of attendees, many with multiple books they wanted signed. (It was announced in advance that he would not sign any Star Trek memorabilia or engage in conversation.) I was about at the halfway point in the signing line, and it was more than ninety minutes before I got to the front. As I waited, after a while, they said Takei would sign no more than three books per person. A bit later, they changed it to one book. And soon after that, they said he would only sign his name, no personalizations. I did also get his husband's signature.

My Klein bottle

(Klein bottles only exist in four-dimensional space, but a self-intersecting model of a Klein bottle can be made in 3D.)

Sometime in my teen years, I read the Time-Life book Mathematics. One photo caught my eye: Princeton math professor Albert W. Tucker's Klein bottle: 

I wrote to him asking where he had got it.  He wrote back and said the University glassblower had made it for him, but had found it very difficult, and wasn't going to do it again! 

But in 1999, a story in the San Jose Mercury News said someone in Berkeley was selling these. I bought the small one pictured at the top of this piece. I exchanged a few emails with the seller, Cliff Stoll, and realized I had read his book The Cuckoo's Egg. Click here for his Klein bottle store.