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I had trouble sleeping a few nights ago. This happens to me from time to time. I know that looking at a screen when you're trying to sleep is a terrible idea, and if I have a paper book on the go sometimes I'm good and I'll get up for a bit and read that. But often I end up cruising around the small internet instead. Lettuce's gemlog, after all, is best visited between 1am and 6am local time. Says so right on the landing page:
But the other night I was cruising around Gopherspace, and noticed that earlier this year, Defanor had made a phlog post about knots. Reading somebody mention the Ashley Book of Knots made me smile.
Defanor's 2023-01-15 phlog post "Knots"
I went through a brief "knot phase" while I was living in Finland, which included borrowing the Ashley Book of Knots from my local library. That book is the bible of knot geeks. It assigns unique numeric IDs to every knot under the sun, because the same/different names have been and are are will be used for differnet/the same knots in different places, at different times, in differnet languages, so names for knots are actually frustratingly ambiguous if you want to get serious about it. It's a big book, which isn't surprisng. Knots are one of humanity's oldest technology, and during the age of sail, knowing everything there is to know about joining and looping rope was genuine life-or-death stuff for huge numbers of people.
English Wikipedia article on The Ashley Book of Knots
That knot phase of mine didn't last very long. I think it was kicked off by wanting to get better at pitching tarp shelters. I was a scout, way back when, and no doubt learned plenty of knots, probably even a badge or two. Subsequently I have forgotten everything except the clove hitch, which I think I can actually tie, and the reef knot, which is just the *name* I know of a knot that exists. I decided to set that right, and did some research, and learned that some of those scout knots I got taught actually aren't very good. I came up with a very small set of good, easy to tie knots, one or two of each major type, and for a brief while I practiced them regularly with some paracord I left beside the couch. Now it's maybe five years later and, surprise, surprise, I can remember the names of almost two of them (bowline and something-something-alpine-butterfly?) and can't tie either from memory.
But despite seeming predisposed to forgetting practical knot knowledge very quickly, I retain one clear memory from that short-lived phase. The existence of the gnat hitch!
Why is the gnat hitch interesting? Because it was documented for the first time ever in February 2012, which on the timescale of knot history is yesterday. Now, obviously, coming up with a genuinely novel knot that nobody has ever tied before is not hard. You can just keep adding all kinds of useless, random, repetitive, extra loops and twists and things and pretty quickly find a brand new little corner of the vast combinatorial-explosion-space of knots. But nobody will care about that knot, it'll be useless. What's shocking about the gnat hitch is that it's not some obscure, elaborate, inpractical oddity. It's a prefectly functional knot. It doesn't come undone by itself easily when you don't want it to under load or jostling, but it also tends not to jam itself up so tight that it's impossible to undo it on purpose when you're ready to. And it's quick and easy to tie! The first time I watched an animation showing how to tie the gnat hitch, my immediate reaction was "Heck, I've probably done one or two of those in my life without even knowing what I was doing it"!
Animated guide to the gnat hitch at animatedknots.com
And, hey, maybe I had. I think it's exceedingly unlikely that nobody ever *tied* a gnat hitch until 2012. But apparently nobody anywhere ever gave this knot a name and included it in a book of knots or a training manual or anything like that. That is just astonishing! And, somehow, uplifting. Even when uncountably many person-hours have been thrown at exploring a problem space over many generations, with very strong, practical incentives to find good solutions, sometimes there's perfectly good stuff just lying there overlooked in a corner, waiting for somebody to stumble across it and be the first to say "Hey, what about this?".