It’s Been a While, or “Eine klein Nachtesnonsense”

It’s been a lot of things actually. “A while” is the least of them. Two years or thereabouts since I deigned to share my neural explosions with you, good reader. As ever, a chain of random yet tenuously related events led me here to this desk, in front of my long-suffering keyboard, to offer a post or so for any remaining follower’s of the Quieter Elephant.

This time it began as a search for fountain pen ink. Lamy (the German pen manufacturer) issued a 2020 special edition colour known as Turmaline, after the complex colours of Tourmaline – the mineral. It’s a turquoise colour this ink, but with a pink sheen when it’s dried. Very fetching.

A review of it can be found here from WonderPens which I recommend if for no other reason than they’re Canadian.

Image source: Wonderpens.ca

So anyway, that led me to a very pleasant morning cleaning a previously problematic fountain pen I’d once mistakenly filled with “dipping ink” (non-aqueous and bad news for fountain pens. Lesson learnt!) Anyway, I then had to test it (good results so far) and wandered off into messing about with some actual dipping pen nibs I have for calligraphy. Trouble there is the nibs are very “scratchy” and really demand good quality paper if one is to avoid making a complete mess.

That in turn led me to dig out my now rarely consulted Moleskine notebook. I adore the silky smooth paper in that. And lo – there I found some snippets of intesely bad poetry and 5½ pages of “things to blog about” dated, well, not, actually. A got better at dating my scribbles in later pages.

I smiled in fond recollection of the megabytes of nonesense I have contributes over the years to the collective digital compost that is “The Internet” and thought – why not? It has indeed been a while! One of the items leapt from the page due to another recent experience – “Klein bottles”. I’d marked it as having been covered, but it turns out to be a passing remark in an early post (2011) which now points to a stale link. (I got better at avoiding those too over the years!) Excuse enough to revisit the subject.

So the Klein link? Well – years ago a science teacher recommended we all watch The Christmas Lectures broadcast from The Royal Institution (Sir Isaac Newton’s baby). Kind of like TED Talks for kids… in the 70s. I was blown away – it was Carl Sagan talking about The Cosmos. Heady stuff for a geeky teenager. (Before I became a geeky adult.)

Random YouTube meanderings took me to a couple of videos by Matt Parker on what is now the Ri channel. He’s an ex-maths teacher from Australia now based in the UK and spending his days popularising mathematics with a splash of stand-up comedy. The lecture on Things to see and hear in the 4th dimension was particularly amusing and culminated in the revelation that Klein Bottles were his favourite shape and the still mind-warping explanation of what that might infer if it was the 3D “shadow” of a 4D object.

Discovered/invented in 1882, the Klein bottle is like a 3D version of a Möbius strip. It has only one surface which is its inside and its outside…

Image Source: Core 77

All pretty geeky stuff. But Matt Parker went the extra kilometer – oh yes he did!

The classic visualisations are typically made of glass, but require specialist skills in glass-blowing to create. What then, if instead of access to a glass-blowing artisan to make you a Klein bottle, you only had access to say – your mum?

Yup – Matt Parker got his mum to knit him a Klein bottle hat, and geeky it most certainly is. But wait – there’s more! He’s not just a geek. He’s a maths geek. Though the Klein bottle hat was a feat of knitting wonder, he finessed it and got his mum to make another, with alternating rows of colour so that they represent the first 47 or so decimal places of Pi. Even the decimal point is represented by a different colour, right on the brim where it folds under.

Matt Parker wearing Klein bottle hat made by his gifted mum. Image source: Ravelry

This, dear reader, is right up here with knitting your own version of Tom Baker’s Dr Who scarf! Not only is his mum a knitting guru but generous with it. If you’d like to make your own the pattern is available free as a PDF via Ravelry.