Perfect tie knot mathematically found 135
An anonymous reader writes
"Thomas Fink and Yong Mao of Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory have discovered six new "aesthetically pleasing" tie knots. Now that the perfect tie knot has been mathematically proven, will geeks everywhere flock to ties?"
No.
Geeks wear ties (Score:1)
I don't try and wear those cartoon or otherwise humors ties because I think that's like saying "I'll wear a tie, but I'm really much cooler than that."
I've noticed most of the marketroids wear those kind of ties. I just find a decent suit and try to use it as camo so I can hide in my cube and code undisturbed.
GW2K (Score:1)
I wouldn't buy one today though.
Cow Ties (Score:1)
Cows with Santa hats and green scarves.
Finally, someone releases the Source ... (Score:1)
I've given up on the whole tie platform because I never had an open source knot application to run on it - had to perpetually ask to 'borrow' copies of Tie Knot from friends, co-workers, etc., and not only that but the user interface sucked so bad that I had to get their help installing Tie Knot on my (admittedly antiquated and underpowered) green polyester tie *every* day.
My old tie crashed every day, and no matter how hard I tried to baby it's uptime at the end of the workday, pulling it over my head, loosening it a little, etc. after about a week, Tie Knot was just far too much of a resource-hog and my tie system ended up constricted and laggy as hell.
Maybe now that I can download the source to various Tie Knot implementations I can dust off the ol' tie, compile the source, and get it up and running again.
Thank you OSS community! You Rule!
REVEALED: Why Geeks don't like ties (Score:1)
get away with it.
Even while everyone else is wearing a suit and
tie, we can waltz in wearing something comfortable
(say, a t-shirt, shorts and tevas). It makes us
feel better then everyone else to know we can get
away with stuff they can't.
It's classier than standing atop your boss' desk
and yelling, "I am the only one who understands
the computer systems! Worship before me, slave!"
----
Excuse me, but that attitude reeks. (Score:1)
Undergeek (Score:1)
Undergeek (Score:1)
Long hair and suits. (Score:1)
Bowtie (Score:1)
My favourite bowtie is one from H-P back in the day with "schematic" caps and resistors on it.
So, yeah... last big dress-up thing... I'm all about fun retro... Khakis, white shirt, blue jacket, Art Deco bowtie, khaki socks and Birkenstocks, and a wool Hound'stooth fedora, and my mid-back Jesus-style hair and a UNIX lover's beard.
What a geek look.
If your tie chokes you... (Score:1)
...the problem is with your _shirt_. You need to make sure you get one with a sufficiently sized collar.
b-o-r-i-n-g. (Score:1)
Oooooh-wee. Take a dull subject and make it more dull. What next ? Which way round we're wearing our pants ?
Undergeek (Score:1)
Mirror Link here (Score:1)
Should be avaliable at:
http://members.tripod.com/~crystalake/tie/paper
Which, if you prefer a clickable link, is here [tripod.com].
Hope I can get it all down...
well, some text, no pics (Score:1)
Sorry about that guys.
Pictures would NOT download for me.
(and man, 30 mins to download 3 pages of how many?? I must be insane...)
Of course, you could check out my project too... that's pretty insane as well.
GW cheaper than dell (Score:1)
And I mean quality-wise. Hopefully they've fixed this, but I doubt it (which is one reason their support site sucks for getting drivers).
Gateway performs the wonderful function of changing parts out from under you in the middle of a production run. One day, you'll get a Cirrus Logic video card, the next it'll be an ATI, and yet another day, you'll get a Matrox. Motherboards change, too, as do drives and sometimes soundcards.
Tie != Suit (women) (Score:1)
And of course, nothing impresses me more than a nicely dressed (or undressed) woman who can appreciate the above and who makes a nice salary to support even more of the above!
I must be the worlds happiest man.
Full paper in nature (extracts below) (Score:1)
The simplest of conventional tie knots, the four-in-hand, has its origins in late-nineteenth-century England. The Duke of Windsor, as King Edward VIII became after abdicating in 1936, is credited with introducing what is now known as the Windsor knot, from which its smaller derivative, the half-Windsor, evolved. In 1989, the Pratt knot, the first new knot to appear in fifty years, was revealed on the front page of The New York Times.
Rather than wait another half-century for the next sartorial advance, we have taken a more formal approach. We have developed a mathematical model of tie knots, and provide a map between tie knots and persistent random walks on a triangular lattice. We classify knots according to their size and shape, and quantify the number of knots in each class. The optimal knot in a class is selected by the proposed aesthetic conditions of symmetry and balance. Of the 85 knots that can be tied with a conventional tie, we recover the four knots that are in widespread use and introduce six new aesthetically pleasing knots.
A tie knot is started by bringing the wide (active) end to the left and either over or under the narrow (passive) end, dividing the space into right (R), centre (C) and left (L) regions (Fig. 1a). The knot is continued by subsequent half-turns, or moves, of the active end from one region to another (Fig. 1b) such that its direction alternates between out of the shirt ( ) and into the shirt (). To complete a knot, the active end must be wrapped from the right (or left) over the front to the left (or right), underneath to the centre and finally through (denoted T but not considered a move) the front loop just made.
The symmetry of a knot, which is our first aesthetic constraint, is determined by the number of moves to the right minus the number of moves to the left,
where xi=1 if the ith step is , -1 if the ith step is and 0 otherwise. Because asymmetric knots disrupt human bilateral symmetry, we consider the most symmetric knots from each class, that is, the ones that minimize s.
Whereas the centre number and the symmetry s specify the move composition of a knot, balance relates to the distribution of these moves; it corresponds to the extent to which the moves are mixed. A balanced knot is tightly bound and keeps its shape. We use this as our second aesthetic constraint. The balance b may be expressed as
and the winding direction i(i, i+1)=1, where i represents the ith step of the walk, if the transition from i to i+1 is clockwise, say, and -1 otherwise. Of those knots that are optimally symmetric, we desire that knot which minimizes b.
The ten canonical knot classes {h, } and the corresponding most aesthetic knots are listed in Table 1. The four named knots are the only ones, to our knowledge, to have received widespread attention, either published or through tradition. Here we introduce some unnamed knots.
The first four columns of Table 1 describe the knot class {h, }, whereas the remainder relate to the corresponding most aesthetic knot. The centre fraction /h provides a guide to the shape of a knot, with higher fractions corresponding to broader knots; along with the size h, it should be used in selecting a knot.
Some readers may notice the use of knots whose sequences are equivalent to those shown in Table 1 apart from transpositions of , groups, such as the use of LRCRLCT in place of the half-Windsor (T. P. Harte and L. S. G. E. Howard, personal communication); some will argue that this is the half-Windsor. Such ambiguity follows from the variable width of conventional ties (the earliest ties were uniformly wide). This makes some transpositions arguably favourable, namely the last , group in the knots {5, 2}, {6, 2}, {7, 2}, {8, 3} and {9, 3} in Table 1. We do not attempt to distinguish between these knots and their counterparts; this much we leave to the sartorial discretion of the reader.
Thomas M. Fink, Yong Mao
Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge CB3 0HE, UK
e-mail: tmf20@cus.cam.ac.uk [mailto]
--
W.A.S.T.E.
Full paper in nature (extracts below) (Score:1)
So it doesn't mean very much without the graphics and that vital table, does it? Oh well, never mind. There's an interesting article in there on `two-photon microfabrication' which has been allegedly `used to demonstrate a scheme for three-dimensional [optical] data storage which permits fluorescent and refractive read-out, and the fabrication of three-dimensional micro-optical and micromechanical structures, including photonic-bandgap-type structures' (my emphasis), so it's worth buying anyway.
PS I tried all of their suggested knots last night, and the only one I could make look half-way decent was the good old four-in-hand. *shrug*
--
W.A.S.T.E.
Tie != Suit (Score:1)
schematic
new record?? (Score:1)
Bank geek (Score:1)
Geeks wear ties (Score:1)
Right, and most computer geeks staring at a ~17" diagonal flat screen are in need of spatial and elliptical perception. :-)
Suits are fun! (Score:1)
Ever heard the Ludichrist song, "Well-Dressed Man Disguise"?
Security generally only applies to shy, poorly-dressed people. Trim the hair, nails and face fur, carry a briefcase, look intent and you can wander almost anywhere.
Suits double your consulting rates.
In the States, suits are ideal for concealed carry.
And folks will take your weird-ass Chomsky marketing/social control theories, amateur Sociology and Marxist economic analysis to mean you have an ivy-league MBA.
A well-chosen and properly-tied tie doesn't choke, keeps you out of grunt work and dusty equipment (unless you want to look like a hero) and distracts people from the fact that you've been wearing the same clothes for the past four days.
Undergeek (Score:1)
Despite popular opinion suits are acceptable geek attire. (As evidence: one of the lone gunmen always wears a suit.)
Fiction (Score:1)
"will geeks everywhere flock to ties?" (Score:1)
Why not? Won't it be even more exciting --oh, you mean as formal neckwear, never mind.
Undergeek (dec openbsd install) (Score:1)
Slashdotted Already? (Score:1)
oh yeah. i think so. mirror anyone???
Did anyone else read that... (Score:1)
----------------------
Why does this article have the penguin icon? (Score:1)
Why does this article have the penguin icon? (Score:1)
Undergeek (Score:1)
brett
GW2K (Score:1)
Also, if anything went wrong the helpdesk was useless and you had to pay to ship back any faulty hardware to Eire with only a vague promise of a refund. Get someone to come onsite ? No chance.
Still, perhaps they have changed since then....
Bank geek (Score:1)
People Just dont know any better (Score:1)
2) Plectrum (or Screwdriver, if you're brave!).
People Just dont know any better (Score:1)
Trim those nails (that includes cleaning under them), get a haircut, shave, shine those shoes (no, not your birks, the ones you keep with your pair of socks) and throw on a suit. You'll be surprised at the respect it commands when you walk onto a job. Plus, as was said, you attract a new breed of women. Some may be money grubbin, but you can at least sleep with them until you find the ones that just like men who look powerful and sucessful.
M
Conformity vs. Looking good. (Score:1)
It should also be noted that you are not considered dressed up if you are wearing a polo type shirt you got for free from a seminar or conference. Look down. If you see a logo on your shirt from someone other than it's maker and the shirt has buttons, you aren't putting in enough effort.
M
new record?? (Score:1)
Bank geek, GW aaarrrrghh (Score:1)
Now if only they'd release something truly geekworthy instead of just talking about it...
There's more than one way to tie a tie? (Score:1)
I just find some way that holds it in place and looks right on the front...
I've probably never tied a tie the same way twice (exaggeration).
Also, when I'm putting a tie on, mathematical perfection is usually *not* what's going through my head. Usually it's more like "uuuggkkk AIR! ugkkk! Why am I putting this damn thing on? ugggkk gasp gasp swear
new record?? (Score:1)
Necktie repository web site (Score:1)
http://fly.hiwaay.net/~jimes/necktie [hiwaay.net]
2 bytes/sec (Score:1)
Is this important?.... (Score:1)
I like to wear suits to work and prefer Grateful dead ties...
But who cares!!!!
Behold the power of cheese...
Whoa (Score:1)
sorry - pet peeve of mine.
Geeks wear ties (Score:1)
When given the choice (Score:1)
Slashdotted Already? (Score:1)
Geeks wear ties (Score:1)
Two thousand bucks? Where is that money all going?
The last time I went and bought a suit, I got myself a very nice Nino Cerruti -- a beautiful Italian number that, depending on what other accoutrements I put with it, can make me look like anything from a Mafia capo to a hip record company exec to a SoMa Internet consultant. It cost something like $350 or $400.
The suit before that was a much cheaper black one that I picked up in a hurry for a wedding or something, and ran about $100, IIRC. Maybe $150.
So let's say you get one nice suit at $400, two of lesser quality at a total of $300, and then with another $300, you can get as many button-down shirts and neckties as you need. Total: $1000.
And that's taking the high-side estimates on those prices. What do you need for a suit and tie environment that costs a total of $2000?
Though I'll admit that even only $1000 taken out of the computer equipment budget is pretty noticeable. $1000 can buy a decent amount of toys and stuff.
Accessories, cleaning... (Score:1)
I'm pretty sure you can, although I hadn't really been thinking of shoes. Like another poster mentions below, you can pick up decent-looking shoes pretty cheap.
Many of my favorite ties have been bought from street vendors for under $10 -- generally more like $3 or 4! (Washington DC, where I used to live, does have a lot of tie-selling street vendors. I haven't seen that phenomenon here in San Francisco...) Even in stores, though, they can usually be found for between $10 and 20. And I'm talking about at-least-decent ones, not those angry-fruit-salad hideosities that some places stock.
As for the remaining socks and button-down shirts, neither of these needs to be very expensive. They also need not be conservative -- I used to wear my suit with brightly colored silk button-down shirts ($20 apiece at any of a gazillion shops in Georgetown) back in DC, and nobody batted an eye. For a similar price, you can get a standard, run-of-the-mill button-down shirt at K-Mart and again, nobody will care.
So, my analysis there is: $100 on shirts gets you one for each day of the week. Figure another $50 for decent shoes, and then you've got yet another $150 for ties and socks. I'm not certain on sock prices lately, but I suspect $50 on socks will get you more of them than you're likely to need, and $100 on ties should buy at least 5 to 10.
I was responding to a consideration of "converting to a suit-and-tie environment", so I can and do count only the one-time costs. Also, since this is just the conversion, the suit need not be dry-cleaned, since it's already clean.
Sorry to be nit-picky. :)
Establishments with Clues (Score:1)
You might want to congratulate said establishments some time, just to let them know they're doing something right.
Undergeek (Score:1)
w
\//
Geeks wear ties (Score:1)
if one day i'm selling something again i will slap on my friend nino, preferably with my stylin', watercolory georges machado neck atttire.
Accessories, cleaning... (Score:1)
And your point is...?
What do you care what your tie looks like? I mean, it's not like you wear a tie to impress babes^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Himprove your social life or anything.
I'm wearing a tie right now, and I hope it's loud enough for all you out there who get /. from a slow feed...
King Babar
Geeks wear ties (Score:1)
Tough choice.
Because.. penguins are wearing 'suits' (Score:1)
--
wooga.
Bank geek (Score:1)
Better yet, let's just forget this whole tie business and make jeans, T-shirts and sneakers the new corporate uniform!
Don't really get paid (Score:1)
do they.