Posts Tagged ‘Rope’
“The world is bound in secret knots”*…
It’s knot easy, but it’s important, to understand knots…
From whimsical flower crowns to carelessly tied shoelaces to hopelessly tangled headphones, knots are everywhere.
That’s not surprising, as knots are quite ancient, predating both the use of the axe and of the wheel and potentially even the divergence of humans from other apes. After all, ropes and cords are practically useless without being tied to something else, making one of the most ancient technologies still remarkably relevant today.
But these tie-offs can be a problem, since knots actually decrease the strength of a rope. When a rope made up of multiple fibers is taut, those fibers all share equal portions of the load. However, the bending and compression where the knot forces the rope to curve (usually around itself, or around the thing it is tied to) create extra tension in only some of the fibers. That’s where the rope will break if yanked with too much force. And this isn’t a small effect: common knots generally reduce the strength of a rope by 20 percent for the strongest ones, to over 50 percent for a simple overhand knot.
Experience has taught surgeons, climbers, and sailors which knots are best for sewing up a patient, or rescuing someone from a ravine, or tying off a billowing sail, but until some recent research from a group at MIT it was hard to tell what actually makes one knot better than another…
Which knot is the strongest? “The tangled physics of knots, one of our simplest and oldest technologies,” from Margaux Lopez (@margaux_lopez_).
See also: “The twisted math of knot theory can help you tell an overhand knot from an unknot.”
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As we understand the over and under, we might send constructive birthday greetings to John “Blind Jack” Metcalf; he was born on this date in 1717. Blind from the age of six, he was an accomplished diver, swimmer, card player, and fiddler. But he is best remembered for his work between 1765 and 1792 when he emerged as the first professional road builder in the Industrial Revolution. He laid about 180 miles of turnpike road, mainly in the north of England– and became known as one of the “fathers of the modern road.”
Just before his death, he documented his remarkably eventful life; you can ready it here.
“The map is not the territory”…
“The Treachery of Images,” René Magritte, 1928-9
Alfred Korzybski reminds one (in the title-line quote, above), as does Surrealist wit like Magritte’s, that representations are not the things they represent.
Still, they fascinate us– precisely because of their power to evoke the thing that they aren’t. And when the things that maps evoke aren’t real things at all? Even niftier!
Consider, for example, two kinds of maps of fictional territories…
For nine years, from 1943 to 1952, Dell published 557 mystery novels with “map backs.” Some charted fictional action on “real” terrain, for instance…
But most located the imagined plot in an imaginary setting, for example…
and…
In a different imaginary arena (not to say “a parallel universe”), the world of comics, comic books, and graphic novels, maps also play an important role…
Sometimes they are used to elaborate on a conceit in a way that adds narrative credibility through detail, e.g…
Nick Fury’s Tunnel, Strange Tales #141
…and sometimes, simply for dramatic effect, e.g…
Superman throws out the first pitch
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hypperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is never the less the map that proceeds the territory – pressesion of simulacra- that engenders the territory.
– Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulation, 1994
Or, as someone who isn’t a French Post-Structuralist might say, way cool!
Readers can find more Bantam map-backs at Marble River’s Ephemera (from whence, the examples above) and at Mystery Scene. Readers can get more graphic guidance at Comic Book Cartography (the source of those examples). Grateful TotH to reader MH-H for the lead to CBC.
As we endeavor (but not too hard) to avoid the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 (44 years to the day after “Bicycle Day,” the day that Dr. Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, deliberately took the hallucinogen for the first time) that The Simpsons debuted, as a short within The Tracey Ullman Show.
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