Andrew D. HwangThis commercially 3D-printed torus knot plays off the classic barber pole illusion, converting rotation about an axis into an appearance of non-rigid "smoke-ring roll."
I had it printed in late summer 2024 for an AMS session talk on continuous group actions and visual illusions, and as a prospective mobile (shown) or desk toy.
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Just to report on the state of online commerce since I re-opened 13 months ago: Sales are all but non-existent (which is understandable), and over the past four (4) days my shop received more than one-quarter (~27%) of its all-time visits, i.e., was hit by a distributed entity, likely based outside the US, coming through VPNs (which is comprehensible, but for different reasons). Half of those visits, more than one-eighth of total visits for 13 months, were yesterday.
No referers, no blockable user agent, one page per visit, sucking out about 10 days of typical bandwidth per day, mostly product pages for print-on-demand items. Impossible to know if this was a harvest of AI training data, or wholesale product theft, or a low-grade DDOS attack, or what.
This was not the first time, but the sophistication is increasing. And it's hard to believe my small, independent shop would be the target of a coordinated attack unless all small, independent shops are.
Bathsheba Grossman