What a tangled Web we weave

Posted on January 13, 2008
Filed Under kites, pataboy, saturdays, tangles |

 Earlier this week, I spent some time reading this article, A Tangled Tale, about a study some mathematicians physicists have been conducting to determine the physics of random knot tying. They identified 14 one-loop tangles and at least 7 2 two-loop tangles. I ran across this over at o’Reilly Radar.

Little did I know that I would so quickly have need for this information.

Yesterday, I took my son, Pataboy, out for some kite flying. The wind was a little light, but we eventually got her up. Pataboy dubbed the kite the pirate octopus kite, in reference to its Joly Roger symbol and streamer. Technically there were 10, not 8 , streamers; which would make it more of a pirate squid kite, but I didn’t want to quibble. I got about 150 yards of string out and had her up about 100′ or so. The boy got bored eventually, leaving me to fly the kite and him to wander around on the track at the bottom of the hill we were on. I started pulling in the kite, but then started to run into problems. Before pulling the kite in, it was up high enough that she had constant wind. As I started to reel her in, I started to lose the wind, causing the kite to fall. When I started, this would have been OK, but now the kite was far enough out that if she fell, she would go over the track and fall into the middle of a soccer practice. To avoid this, I had to pull in the kite hand over hand, just dropping the string on the ground.

The more astute of you see where this is going.

Needless to say, after it was all reeled in, I had a huge tangle of kite string to undo. 45 minutes later, I still have one tangle left to undo. I didn’t bother counting how many different tangle-types I dealt with.

oh - as we left and headed back to our car, I saw something I had missed as we walked into the park - a scene straight from Charlie Brown, a kite caught in the tree. It made me realize one thing that is wrong with 4 year olds, they don’t have enough cultural knowledge to see why that was funny.

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