Elastic knots are really mind bending

I forgot to say, the puzzle knot by Langer is 9_46 (9 underscore 46). The sponsor is Ground News - give it a try at ground.news/SteveMould. If you sign up through my link you’ll get 40% off the Vantage plan which gives you unlimited access to every Ground News feature. Your subscription directly supports Ground News on their mission to make the media landscape more transparent.

"But it's not stable, and if I let it go it ends up touching itself again" feeling personally attacked by this

I was always fascinated by these when trying to pack my "2 seconds" tent at the end of a festival. Turns out, the time you save when it "assembles itself", you really invest at the end, learning how it will go back in its bag

Help my Marvin the Martian is self touching

3:18 I found the non-self-touching relaxed knot you mentioned not existing! I call it - the Un-knot! And there's actually an alphanumeric character for it: "°"

9:15 "... but it's knot."

Reminds me of how I unwrap new bandsaw blades, which come in overlapping loops: I remove the ties, and toss is across the shop.

That was the smoothest transition to a sponsor I've ever seen. 10/10

Casual exposition style belies mastery of conveying so many beautiful concepts with ease. Thanks for putting in the effort Steve!

The beginning of the video I start feeling the cold sweats, and I'm instantly reminded of those window shades for cars or those quick pop up tents/sunshades that I can never figure out how to rebend to fit in the same size area.

"Marvin the Martian" LOL

I don't know if you'll see this Steve but I appreciate Algodoo is still used today! I'll recognise that cursor and UI anywhere! It was a great learning tool for much younger me.

I have a fishing hat with mosquito net that uses one of these configurations. When not worn, it packs flat in an envelope. When you pull it out, it springs to life as a full-size hat.

3:38 no self control 😔

Lord Kelvin's attempts to make mechanical models of elementary particles is one of the coolest failures in history. Also kinda tragic because he was so convinced that he could apply his engineering genius to the atomic scale that, late in life, he got a bit obsessed with trying to model the aether and refused to accept other theories. Shouldn't overshadow his many MANY other accomplishments though. Biographies of Thompson are always a good read, much recommend.

This is uncannily similar to my graduate thesis, except there we were exploring optimization algorithms and applying them to untying knots. In one part of the research we used prime knots as input for our knot modeling software and randomly cut the knots so that they would then be "untie-able". Then we used an optimization algorithm to "shake" the knot until it was untied. I'm not sure if the clips shown starting at 4:58 are from something the authors provided or something else, but it looks so similar to what we built I gasped!

I love your videos, Steve. I'm going through a bit of a hard time in my life at the moment and have felt sad. But your videos always enlighten me and cheer me up.

Polite request that it would be good if you could put things a bit higher up in the frame so that they don't get covered by the subtitles ❤

3:38 I can relate.

3:38 I think we all end up touching ourselves if we've ever been let go 💔