Comment by burnt-resistor

10 hours ago

"Double Slip Knot" (ABOK 1219 p. 221) is the canonical name with prior art. Calling it [your name] knot is pompous "discovery" of lands already occupied revisionist history. The main problem with it is that the free ends and loops cannot be balanced easily like a standard Bow Knot (ABOK 1214 p. 220). A Bow Knot may also be fixed by adding an opposing Half Knot ("The Shoeclerk's Knot" (ABOK 1215)) while losing the slip feature that the Double Slip Knot retains.

4 comments

burnt-resistor

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Syzygies  3 hours ago

There's the finished knot, and there's his way of tying it, which is easy to grasp.

That strikes a chord for me. In grade school my teachers could not distinguish between these perspectives, for the standard shoelace knot. I found their method stupid, and they thought my method was wrong. This was but one of many lessons that helped me to learn to think for myself.

rahimnathwani  9 hours ago

From the site:

  Years later I found out that my new knot was not new and that I had simply re-invented an existing knot, which appears elsewhere under two different names:

  “Double Slip Knot” (#1219) in “The Ashley Book of Knots” by Clifford Ashley;
  “Seaman's Shoelace Knot” (or “Seemännische Schuhbandschleife”), which appears in the German book “Knoten, Spleißen, Takeln” by Erich Sondheim.

xp84  10 hours ago

I'm pretty sure knot techniques can't be copyrighted, so nobody owns it or has the exclusive right to name it. Someone can call it the Ham Sandwich knot if they want. Who cares?

Besides, I'm pretty sure Ian has done a lot more to spread the knowledge of this particular knot than anyone else in history.

  • endgame  3 hours ago

    Ashley is the canonical list of knots, so it's good for people who haven't heard of ABOK to hear about it since we're talking knots today.

    Probably time to drop another coin in Ian's tip jar too.