Take a moment and consider the woefully underappreciated knot. They keep shoes tight, pajamas up, and neckties sharp. Look close enough, and you'll realize that most of your clothing is just a tightly woven skein of very fine knots.
But the glory of the humble knot goes far beyond fashion. Knots have pushed human civilization forward, entering history at most major moments. What technology led fisherman to the invention of nets? Knots. Rope suspension bridges, mountain climbing gear, life-saving tourniquets, life-taking nooses, pretzels? All pivotal inventions made possible by the knot.
"Knots are an ancient technology," Jody Rosen writes in the New York Times. "They predate the axe and the wheel, quite possibly the use of fire, and maybe even man himself: Some scientists have speculated that the first knotters were animals, gorillas who tied simple 'granny knots,' interlacing branches to construct nests."
Knots, in other words, are so ubiquitous that most of the time we fail to notice how important they are to being human.
 KnotsFebruary 02, 2019 |
An ode to knots
Take a moment and consider the woefully underappreciated knot. They keep shoes tight, pajamas up, and neckties sharp. Look close enough, and you'll realize that most of your clothing is just a tightly woven skein of very fine knots.
But the glory of the humble knot goes far beyond fashion. Knots have pushed human civilization forward, entering history at most major moments. What technology led fisherman to the invention of nets? Knots. Rope suspension bridges, mountain climbing gear, life-saving tourniquets, life-taking nooses, pretzels? All pivotal inventions made possible by the knot.
"Knots are an ancient technology," Jody Rosen writes in the New York Times. "They predate the axe and the wheel, quite possibly the use of fire, and maybe even man himself: Some scientists have speculated that the first knotters were animals, gorillas who tied simple 'granny knots,' interlacing branches to construct nests."
Knots, in other words, are so ubiquitous that most of the time we fail to notice how important they are to being human.
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300,000 BC: The first evidence of knots in the archaeological record.
3,400 BC: The Ice Man dies on a mountain pass in what is now Italy; found in 1991, his clothing and items contain approximately 11 kinds of knots.
333 BC: Alexander the Great encounters the Gordian Knot, a specimen so jumbled it's impossible to untangle. (He solves the problem by slicing it with a sword.)
1718: The phrase "tie the knot" appears for the first time to denote a marriage.
1748: An 18-headed rat king—a tangle of rats knotted together by their tails—appears in the appropriately named town of Gross-Baulhhausen, Germany.
1871: An edict in Japan forces the Samurai to cut their top knot hairstyle.
1973: Garlic knots are reportedly invented in Queens, New York.
1982: The International Guild of Knot Tyers is founded.
1989: Scientists create the first molecular knot, a trefoil.
"There are still old knots that are unrecorded, and so long as there are new purposes for rope, there will always be new knots to discover."
—"master knot tyer, maritime artist, historian, and author" Clifford W. Ashley
The world's tightest knot
In January 2017, scientists at the University of Manchester announced in the journal Science that they had tied one of the world's smallest and tightest knots. Boasting eight crossing strands—three more than previously achieved—the molecular knot was 20 nanometers long and contained just 192 atoms.
The extra layer of knotting could someday help researchers create a material so light, flexible, and strong that it could make Kevlar look like cardboard. "Knots may ultimately prove just as versatile and useful at the nanoscale as at the macroscale," the authors wrote. Researchers are now working on a "periodic table of knots" or "knot zoo" to determine what further knots are possible.
Knots to know
Monkey's fist: A heaving or decorative knot
Half-blood knot: Fishing knot for attaching a hook to a line
San Diego Jam: "popularized in San Diego particularly with long-range tuna fisherman"
Ian knot: "The World's Fastest Shoelace Knot"
Pratt knot: A necktie knot "of medium size, versatile and elegant"
Trucker's hitch: "Through the loop / make a stitch / now you've got your trucker's hitch"
Muscle knot: The ones you get in your neck and shoulders? They might be "small bits of hyper-tensed muscle"… or they might not exist at all.
Why do headphones (and Christmas lights… and phone chargers…) tangle?
It's a fact of modern life: You neatly coil your headphones before stashing them in a bag—only to find a tangled mess later. In 2007, physicists at the University of California tried to figure out why this happens by sealing different lengths of cord in a rotating box and observing whether the strands became spontaneously tangled. In the end, they saw more than 120 different types of knots form.
Why does it happen? It's pretty simple: to fit in a small space, a cord is coiled up. When the cord is jostled, one end or another slips between coils. "If it moves enough times, the end will essentially braid itself around some part in the middle, tangling up the string and creating different knots," writes Ariel Zambelich in Wired.
There is a secret to prevention: keep it short. The researchers found that cords less than 46 centimeters long were unlikely to get tangled. "With a cord longer than that, the probability of a knot forming reaches a plateau of 50 percent," Jim Edwards writes at Business Insider. Of course, unless you're a wee tot or your Christmas tree is a bonsai, headphone cables or light strands less than a foot and a half long aren't going to cut it.
Have a friend who would enjoy our Obsession with Knots?
The college kid who decrypted Incan census knots
In the 16th century, the Inca controlled the most advanced civilization in all of the Americas—and yet they kept no written records. Rather, they maintained a tactile system of records called khipus, encoding information on a group of knotted strings resembling friendship bracelets.
For hundreds of years, the meaning behind these knotted strings has baffled experts. Anthropologists speculated that they functioned as a census or register of goods—with 14 colors that allow 95 different patterns, "that number is within the range of symbols in logosyllabic writing systems," anthropologist Sabine Hyland told National Geographic.
But no one had actually decoded one until a Harvard student used his spring break to do it. Manny Medrano began studying a set of khipus for his professor Gary Urton, proprietor of the Khipu Database Project. As Medrano compared the strings to a Spanish colonial-era census document, he noticed that "the way each cord was tied onto the khipu seemed to correspond to the social status of the 132 people recorded in the census document," Katherine Davis-Young writes in Atlas Obscura. "The colors of the strings also appeared to be related to the people's first names."
Pop Quiz In 2015, the British supermarket chain Tesco put out a listing for what knotty job? |
The study of knot topology has advanced greatly in recent years—thanks in part to the need for movie and game animators to accurately model hair and ropes.
Why do shoelaces untie themselves?
Writing in the journal Nature, mathematician Burkard Polster says it's because you're just really, really, really bad at tying knots. "Most people place one half granny knot on top of another," Polster writes, "which results in either a notoriously unstable granny knot or a very stable reef knot." (The difference is in whether the two knots have the same or opposite orientations.) Unfortunately, most of us are part of that "unstable granny knot" group. Here's a short TED talk on how to get the reef knot; Bustle has a version with pictures.
However, this video from the University of California, Berkeley—plus this paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society—places most of the blame on a better villain: physics. When you stride, the shoelace ends fly forward, tugging on the knot. When your foot lands, the impact loosens the center of the knot. Repeat a few or a hundred times and it all flies apart.
The Ashley Book of Knots, which is widely considered the knot-making bible, lists nearly 4,000 knots with approximately 7,000 illustrations, along with historical information about the knots and evaluations of their effectiveness. If you're pressed for time, Gizmodo has the five you need to know. The Planetary Society also has a thorough look at the knots used on the Mars Curiosity rover, which are specified by NASA standards.
Poll How many knots can you tie? |
In yesterday's poll about logo bashing, 42% said you hadn't even noticed the changes to the Instagram, YSL, and Pepsi logos. Andrea writes: "If we want to be nitpicky, and most of us do: kerning refers to spacing between two letters and tracking refers to the uniform spacing applied to an entire word, line of text, etc. Graphic designers are guilty of confusing these terms all the time."
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Today's email was written by Lucas Reilly, edited by Whet Moser, and produced by Luiz Romero.
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