Very far OT

Thanks for the url, I've bookmarked it. I tried to respond to you personally, but the msg wouldn't go through. I don't know how to change "munged" e-mail addresses to make them work. Jerry 47

A friend, who is wintering in Mexico, the luck dog, E-mailed me a request for a name. I don't know and Google, probably to my incorrect parameters hasn't produced a result. What he wants to know is the name of the form or figure as he describes it below. Engineers? Any help appreciated.

Cheers all - Jim.

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If one takes a strip of paper (or any other material) say about a 1/2" wide and say 12" long and, holding one end firmly gives the other end one twist, then attaches the two ends together, one now has an object that has been changed from two-sided - duel-plane (a top and a bottom) to a single side or plane. For if one now traces the surface of this strip with a finger one will be able to transverse both 'sides' of the strip without removing the finger from the surface, as it now has only one plane - one continuous 'side'.

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mobius strip.

Or rather - to be pedantic about it - a Möbius strip, after the mathematician who devised it :) Chek Change' boos' to 'bos' in address to email directly

a mobius strip. there is a great short story about the subway in boston beinmg made one. named a subway named mobius. truly amazing story for a high school science lesson in realities..

A three dimensional version is called a Klein Bottle- check out

.

Because I seem to sense a similar spirit seeking after truth and adventure, I can tell you that I keep a handy link to

which has a copy'n'pastable table of the ASCII and extended character family. Or if you have MS Word, going to 'insert' and 'symbol' will give a selection of non-english characters also. To much free time? For me alas, not nearly enough. Chek Change' boos' to 'bos' in address to email directly

FANTASTIC! Many thanks all. Exactly what I was looking for and when I plugged 'mobius strip' into Google I got 38,900 hits.... Bill in Mexico is going to be happy, thanks to you guys..

When all else fails Go to Rec Models Scale

Once again thanks all. Much appreciated. Cheers - Jim.

find him that short story and he'll be ecstatic. it's a real hummah.

This rarely works on PCs because the ALT key (equiv to Mac's Option) is often usurped by program-key combinations. Other Mac tricks include Option n to get a ~ over an 'n', Option e to accent a vowel and Option i for a circumflex. The other Option combinations tend to give variant characters, such as o, a, oe, ae and so on. My personal favorite is the Option semicolon, because it allows me to trail off after contributing to thread drift...

Mark Schynert

Andre Deutsch, Astounding, Dec '50

Also collected in

• Omnibus of Science Fiction, ed. Groff Conklin, Crown, 1952

• Strange Travels in Science Fiction, ed. Groff Conklin, Grayson, 1953

• Science Fiction Omnibus, ed. Groff Conklin, Berkley, 1956

• Fantasia Mathematica, ed. Clifton Fadiman, Simon & Schuster, 1958

• Best SF 4, ed. Edmund Crispin, Faber & Faber, 1961

• One Hundered Years of Science Fiction, ed. Damon Knight, Simon & Schuster, 1968

• Where Do We Go from Here?, ed. Isaac Asimov, Doubleday, 1971

• Laughing Space, ed. Isaac Asimov & J. O. Jeppson, Houghton Mifflin, 1982

Ever read the 'Barmy Jeffers' kids books by J.H. Brennan? He uses a Mobius Strip to go to another world...

Nick

i have the conklin and knight editions.

And don't forget M.C. Echer who incorporated the concept into his art works.

John W. Alger IPMS 10906 Charlotte Scale Modelers

Hmmm. I have the Damon Knight "100 years of SF" in a 2-part paperback edition, by Pan. A good collection with some rarities in it (Kipling, "With The Night Mail" for instance).

In the same vein but with an extra dimension, Robert Heinlein's "...And He Built A Crooked House" depicts an architect's whimsical house, built in the shape of an unfolded tesseract (a four-dimensional cube): - in Los Angeles. There is a small earthquake - and I'll leave the rest as an exercise for the reader :-)

yes, i have the knight also. crooked house is in the heinlein anthology unpleasant preofession of johnathan hoag. really goof bunch of stories......

ooooooops, good bunch of stories.