Shoelace knots

Seriously, it's a fun knot to tie and never comes undone.

There are a couple followups that would be interesting.

1. Try this on a tricycle. On a tricycle you steer in the turn direction and do not need to lean, as opposed to a bike where your counter-steer and lean. It would be interesting to see if that less complicated steering interaction would make it easier or quicker to adapt.

2. Try on a bicycle with training wheels, adjusted so you can still lean but aren't going to actually fall over. (This is important because if you can't lean the training wheels have essentially made the bike into a trike and so the experiment has been reduced to #1).

The idea here is that in most of his videos people were failing very fast. They might not be getting a long enough ride each time to provide enough examples of control actions and responses for their brain to learn much.

Perhaps the training wheels would provide longer trials, giving the brain a lot more to work with.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophic_interference

I also taught the knot to my 10-year-old just to see what she would make of it. Took her three tries to understand and now that's how she ties her shoes. It seemed much easier to explain than the standard.

My only issue is in keeping the starting knot tight. I usually use the standard shoelace knot which makes it easy to keep tension on the lace at all times, and that keeps the starting knot tight. But I'm finding with Ian's fastest knot I lose tension when I'm pushing the two loops towards each other, which causes the starting knot to loosen slightly. Is that something that can be solved with more practice?

It still comes up as a random topic of conversation at every conference I go to where I see someone retying their slippery laces.

The square knot is basic knot tied between two rope ends; the first half of it is much like the first half of the shoe's knot. You then repeat the first half, but swapping which end is on top. Like the shoelace knot, if you do it right, it stays inline (and remains symmetrical and pretty); if you do it wrong, it gets ugly.

Really (at least to me) this is because the shoelaces knot is a square knot; the "bunny ears" are simply added slipknots to make it easier to untie your shoe. But I've never seen the "standard" method taught to tie a square knot, likely because I've never seen the square knot taught with slip knots; those just being something you add if you want them.

Which is how I tie my shoes; I use what the article calls the "two loop knot"[1]. Two methods, same knot, though I always thought my way was the standard, not my dad's. Oh well.

[1]http://fieggen.com/shoelace/twoloopknot.htm