Chris Staecker

I recently had a visit in my office from THE Victor from the Victor company - they are the last of the major American manufacturers of classic adding machines, still operating today!

Victor and I shot several hours of footage which he will be releasing on their channel- I will be posting a few things too, but check out their channel over the next few weeks to see it all!

6 hours ago | [YT] | 3

Chris Staecker

Not kidding: my band The Noodlers is playing THIS SATURDAY Aug 23 at Black Rock Porchfest in Bridgeport CT. 3PM outside by St Ann's church. Free! Porchfest is a big event so there will be lots of other stuff to see too.

The band is all faculty at the university, plus one extremely talented daughter. I am one of two singers, but the other one is at a conference, so it'll be just me.

Follow us on Instagram if you do that sort of thing: www.instagram.com/noodlersband.official/

6 months ago | [YT] | 78

Chris Staecker

For all those paper computer fans, Ryan Buss has created a new paper computer with javascript simulator here:
papercpu.dev/
Yes I will eventually be making more paper computer videos- they are very hard to find but I know of at least 3 more.

7 months ago | [YT] | 73

Chris Staecker

I wrote a blog post at my University about the quipu and yupana. More or less a print version of my yupana video. tmblr.co/Z8P9zkhTcJuqma00

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8 months ago | [YT] | 42

Chris Staecker

A bizarre antique just came into my possession. Can anybody help identify? Each window shows one face of a spinning cylinder with dice markings 1-6 on each one. When you push/pull the wooden bar sticking out the end, the cylinders start going, and spin for a bit before stopping at random positions. The pegs on the front can pull out, which seems to disengage that particular wheel from spinning.
It has no maker's marks except for a stamp on the front "Pat'd Sep 2 1890" and "Pat Apl'd for" (in that order, which is weird).

8 months ago | [YT] | 107

Chris Staecker

From an estate sale Saturday: a “Queen” brand antique vacuum chamber!
(I didnt buy it- the guy wanted $400 which he assured me was a great deal.)

Also a haul from a few weeks back: a fancy protractor with level, a micrometer, a nice old pair of dividers, a cheap metal set of adjustable parallel scales, and an ultra-precision dial indicator in ORIGINAL plastic case! Total price $13 which I think is good? I don't know.

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9 months ago | [YT] | 65

Chris Staecker

Got an amazing package from a viewer- thanks so much Mario!
(That’s not a derivimeter but it’s a protractor with a Vernier arm. Like the Ott but no mirrors or anything to help with tangents)

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1 year ago | [YT] | 122

Chris Staecker

I just started an account at BlueSky:
bsky.app/profile/chrisstaecker.bsky.social
Follow for the best antiviral social media content around!

Here’s a hint from my first fascinating post:

1 year ago | [YT] | 30

Chris Staecker

My sundial short got 3 million views! Thanks to anyone who shared it. There will be retorts.

1 year ago | [YT] | 37

Chris Staecker

For folks following along with the math: we just submitted the followup to our paper "Digital topological groups", this one written with Wayne Johnson and Dae-Woong Lee.

arxiv.org/abs/2408.10087

We look at H-spaces, which is a generalization of topological groups assuming no associativity or inverses, and slightly weakening the identity element.

As in the previous paper, there are two categories: NP1 and NP2. We can fully classify all NP2 H-spaces, showing all connected ones are trivial. For NP1 we don't have a classification, and we still don't have any examples which aren't equivalent to groups!

(Wayne joined the project after seeing my other video and getting some novel ideas!)

1 year ago | [YT] | 20