I know it’s foolish but I want to daydream for a bit that the Web turned out differently. That at some point around Space Jam the people decided that a business being online was a deeply offensive invasion of Our space and would be boycotted, so they gave up on trying. And what was left was lots and lots of webpages like this among the personal pages and pages about nothing. And that services like search engines were provided by universities. And undergrads who attended would take their turn working for these services as a sort of community service rite of passage.
We have web rings and web rungs (more of a ladder topology) and nothing was for sale but the community would be fine with the occasional grandson selling meemaw’s knit scarfs. Oh, and Zombo Com was tolerated given its sheer breadth of utility.
I want to stay up well past my bedtime some summer night, finding some new web zone filled with a clever collection of someone’s identity they shared with the world. Maybe while a breeze gently wanders in through an open window and a train ventures forth in the distance.
If you want to learn just one new, very convenient knot, which can be used in many situations, I recommend the Bowline [2].
https://www.animatedknots.com/shoelace-bow-knot-fieggen-meth...
https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm
It’s a great knot to get other people interested, too, because you can go “alright, so first you start in this position like any other knot, right? Then you just zwoop and done”. Tying your laces in a single fast movement really makes your nerd friends curious. It’s like a magic trick.
Other sites with animated 3D models might be useful for visualizing the topology of knots, or something. But for actually tying the knots I find this site and its curated photos much more practically useful. The fact that it's not literally animated is a feature; it shows the key stages you go through, rather than every detail.
And the photos are just clearer and better than any other resource. (If you look closely you'll see a lot of editing work has been done on them like to minimize the diff between consecutive photos.)
Only downside is that I wish it had more minor knots!
Most knot enthusiasts will already know about it, but in the analog world The Ashley Book of Knots is fantastic. Beautifully illustrated; the author, Clifford Ashley, was a marine painter and spent decades documenting almost 4,000 knots.
Yup. Referring to knots by their ABoK numbers is also more practical than by their wildly varying names.
However, name "animated" will only lead to disappointment for people finding slide shows of humans. This is basically the same kind of that a Boy Scout handbook provides.
I also have read their backstory/naming thing [1] several times but I still don't quite get it. I first thought they were related to the historical Grog, but that was a misunderstanding. I think.
I learned that knot differently, and wonder if mine has a different name.
It's the purest form of human creativity! It's nothing but a strait line and humans have figured out how to twist and turn it into a million different objects and endless uses. Our entire species has propelled itself into a realm of knowledge built on the fundamental twisting of a simple lines and observing those properties.
The clothes you wear are knots. Every surgery you have ends in knots. The combined effect of knots on our technology and understanding of the world is fascinating.
Only humans can see a rope, have a picture in their heads of what it should look like and then set forth on creating it. It's just such a precious nugget of what it means to be human and have the urge to fuck around with shit.
This website was so useful for Boy Scout rank advancement.
also this has been discussed on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=animatedknots.com
https://archive.org/details/TheAshleyBookOfKnots
What's missing from linear serialization of a book format like ABOK and this website is metadata tags that indicate each knot's attribute(s), i.e., bight, open, slip, etc. and an ability to browse and filter by such tag(s).