By federal statute (35 U.S.C. 101), a U.S. utility patent must be new AND useful. Also, getting a patent is relatively super difficult compared to what’s being proposed here.
The bar to getting a U.S. design patent is relatively low. That’s more comparable to what’s being proposed here. Note also that a U.S. design patent is generally considered to be substantially less prestigious than a U.S. utility patent.
I apologize for leading the thread astray. Though there are patents aplenty that I personally find wackier than the knot offerings I’ve seen here. Yes the patents have uses, obscure as they may be. So might the knots.
SS
It’s not like I want to keep the thread derailed. But I just can’t let it slip. Patents original function was to protect an inventor/discoverer. Hard labour or high cost should not be invested in vain. But patent laws, such as they are used in many cases, are a mockery to it’s intent. Here is one: http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6368227
Luckily this one case was reexamined and then dismissed. But it is way too easy to file a worthless patent, and it is way too expensive to protect a promising idea. A lot of reexaminations are left out there, but who will pay for it?
A patent grants to an inventor(s) the legal right to exclude others from capitalizing on his/her intellectual property within a defined period of time. Was then, 'Tis now.
Hi Derek,
Welcome back to another exciting view of “new-ness” in knotting! I think you MAY be correct about having a catalog of knots - it seems at first sight that it would be too difficult to analyze one’s own knot by looking at a bunch of finished knots (a la ABOK) and trying to determine what you have. However, if it is split up like organic chemistry then there could be less confusion, because the structures involved in making a knot could be the rings of carbon or the branches of ammonia or hydrogen or whatever. There are some standard elements to knotting - a turn, a loop, a bight, a weave - such that a single shape could be made from a number of repeats of the essence of such knots (here I am using the generic term “knot” to include weaves, bends, splices, hitches, binders and others) and I think that such a catalog would be easier to understand.
Now to Dan - it appears to me that you are correct, at least in part, when you say that the knot should have some function established also. Maybe such a function is yet to be discovered however, and who better to discover it than someone like yourself who can find the use or not for just about anything we see here in knotting. You seem always to try the knots presented and then, after some initial frustration, state that the knot has no apparent use (not apparent yet or to you, anyway) and therefore should not be considered. How about defining what you consider is “useful”? That might help ‘weed out’ some knots that you have yet to define a use for, wouldn’t it?
Roo - why do you think that a catalog of ‘useful’ knots would be small? Is that not a rather subjective statement? Useful to whom? As for Dan above, useful is something that one could put in a descriptive form, just to see how ‘useful’ such a description or definition might be, don’t you think? OK, this IS the Practical Knots section of the forum, but that should not prevent practical solutions instead of practical dissolution.
For all, maybe we can collectively come up with a way to move forward instead of keep on coming up with reasons for not moving forward. If there is a reason why you think we should not move forward, why not come up with a way in which we CAN move forward? Admittedly we need the negative to balance the positive, but I have not seen very much positive thinking herein.
SR
Whatever system is used to catalogue knots the primary requirement is to be able to find a knot or knots and the secret to that is subdivision into classifications eg loop, noose, hitch etc. With that goes a brief description and suggested uses and characteristics but make no mistake this is a huge undertaking. By way of example a couple of years ago I found a stray flower in the back garden. It took around 15 minutes of searching the internet to find a photo just by looking for a flower, yellow, looks like a thistle, is about 3 ft tall (turned out to be a Romanian Basket Flower which I had never heard of but is now flourishing). If you record simple information about something then the combination of characteristics will narrow the search to looking at a few photos - computers do make this a lot easier than searching eg ABOK. But I’m afraid I do not believe that the resources are presently available to make this worthwhile starting. I hope to be proved wrong.
Barry
I said it would be much, much smaller than a catalog of all possible rope tangles. Even a catalog of 1000 semi-useful knots is going to be smaller than a catalog of 100,000 possible tangles.
I don’t care who the knot in question is useful to, but they better at least be willing to say why it is useful to them, yes?
Admittedly we need the negative to balance the positive, but I have not seen very much positive thinking herein.I believe I've offered a positive solution earlier:
Now, that is positive, time-saving, solution.
While your dishonest ad-hominem attack might have made you feel good, what you describe simply has not happened.
Xarax has presented knots, and people have offered serious critiques on rare occasion, but no one has called it a “CATASTROPHE”, nor has anyone called Xarax a jerk merely for offering photos.
What has happened though is when Xarax is asked about the practical nature of his knots posted in the Practical Knot Forum, he evades the question and gets defensive.
As for my own fictitious reply of the imaginary knot being a watered-down versatackle, I could imagine that being a true and non-negative analogy for some system. 
Your post has been reported as a personal attack, although I doubt anything will happen.
So if I gave an “example” of your behavior, and went on to describe you as a rapist, you wouldn’t call that a personal attack or dishonest?
I would, even if I later called it a “parody” of your behavior instead of an “example”.
I concur in the need for an efficient means to index the CoK,
but not in the difficulty (if not impossibility) of that. I don’t
think that [u]ABOK is all so well organized, to be seen as some
failed effort. An indexing might be one that offers multiple ways
to find some structure, where one might fail at first yet then succeed.
At least in dealing with some reasonable collection of structures,
it should be possible to get through them even with some rather
clumsy verbal guidance --the collection being not THAT big.
Which is to admit that this is not an ideal solution, just one
that can suffice to do a certain job.
@Xarax, You make a good point that usefulness and/or usability are not the sole criteria for studying a knot.
Hmmm, I’m not sure that this is quite Xarax’s written point, above:
rather, that usefulness IS important, but not always easily recognized.
But I accept the point made irrespective of by-whom : there is some
benefit to exploring the universe of knotted structures. But there
a cost of effort in doing so, and some might well choose to apply
what limited effort they have to things that have some apparent
promise of use --from among an infinite universe of possibilities!
- BUT - a) this is the [i]'Practical Knot'[/i] forum, and b) [b]over [at] the [i]'Theory'[/i] forum is a very lonely place,[/b] because of all the billions of people on the world, only a tiny handful have any interest in anything beyond usefulness.
I’ll buy in to A & B, and point out that some indeed do have an
interest, and B should be ameliorated by getting theses sorts of
discussions posted there! And the resistance to that seems to be
that X. DOES claim utility as essentail and so want to claim that
by posting here (an insistence on potentially [i]practical,[/i] i.e.);
he should feel no concession to that position in expounding under
the Theoretical heading. (And, to Xarax, anticipating some
challenge to whether “theoretical” aptly describes such explorations,
recall chess & “theoretical novelty”.)
Okay, “useful” might be presumed in taking some known solutions to what
Pieter van de Griend calls “rope problems” (tasks in which cordage plays a role)
and responding to some critique of them (“… , but the result is a knot that
is difficult to <untie, tie efficiently, … >”), present this new knot as
redressing the perceived failings. E.g., Xarax’s “B Bend” is a variation on
ABOK #1459, from which he moved to a variation that is an extension
what CLDay calls “twin bowlines” ([u]AKS #57, [u]ABOK #1454),
the loops being closer together so that the tails are readily run through
the opposing knot-halves; this extension could be presented with some
note of its supposed benefits. In this vein, I recommended that the
tails go through both turNips both as a closer match to the cited
eye-knot cognate, as well as likely improving security & strength.
If there is a reason why you think we should not move forward, why not come up with a way in which we CAN move forward?
Note that some aspect of the resistance is the particular forum of
presentation. The exploration of knotted structures --especially
if put into some ordered form-- is challenging. It can be helpful
to move thinking beyond the usual, and to better solutions to
rope problems (even of known materials, not depending upon
some future development). The knot universe is vast, though, so
we need order & some way to keep our efforts able to achieve
meaningful understanding; the mere presentation of new knots
is less than what can be done.
Here’s what I propose for my amusement. Someone here get off the couch and put together this catalog of knots where anybody gets to take a pic and put their knot in there. I won’t be doing it because I don’t think it’s a good idea.
A better use of time would be first to organize Ashley Book of Knots with proper indexing, cross referencing, etc., of the myriad of knots. After that, you would have a better mindset of how your catalog should go. Further, you could just plug into the system you devised for ABOK and build from there, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
It’s sad that the people who want to do this catalog would rather sit in this thread and debate the issue until they get approval, or perhaps you just want someone else to do the hard work for you. I’m a small business owner. If I have an idea that I think is good, I don’t sit around and cry for approval. I just make it happen. If it doesn’t work, oh well, at least I tried.
OK,
How would you ‘Properly Index’ this :-
http://igkt.net/sm/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=3130.0;attach=4207;image
image attribution Xarax
I think something along the lines of:
Name - none
Class - bends
Structure - half hitches, interlaced
Author - Xarax
All you need to do is narrow the search sufficiently to be able to look through a set of photographs. Adding the author’s name is not necessarily to attribute discovery but to enable a search for all knots pictured by an individual (who may have a particular interest for example) and to credit the person who tied and drew or photographed the knot (and who has copyright in the picture).
Barry
Not sure…but please provide the link to the thread discussing this. 
So now you are armed with a ‘Proper’ Index of this knot, and an excellent photograph by Xarax, so chances are it comes from this Forum, yet despite this we get :-
So, neither index description, nor image was sufficient to find this knot, nor the description / discussion that went with the post.
Derek
I don’t buy it. You’ve been here way too long to plead ignorance (member since July 2008!).
Regarding the instruments, you can go to many outdoor equipment stores and buy short segments (10 feet or a couple meters) of just about every type of rope they have for less than the cost of one long coil of rope.
I wasn’t trying to make some sort of point in my last post. I honestly want to know where this bend is being discussed. I tied it. It didn’t jam. It’s like a simpler version of the Carrick Bend. I want to know what others have said about it.
To be clear, I am thread jacking and am off topic. 8)
No I don’t remember that. This is what I really said:
http://igkt.net/sm/index.php?topic=1094.msg7461#msg7461
It turns out that I like about 1 out of every 30 knots you post. I usually don’t have the time to try them out. Perhaps I would like more of them if I gave them more attention, but I again I don’t have the time. Also, the complicated looking knots are typically not of interest to me. This knot of yours was posted here by someone else. I figured they liked it and pre-screened it for me.
I already did. It was in the very thread you just misquoted:
http://igkt.net/sm/index.php?topic=1094.msg7391#msg7391
Notice that you presented it in a way that discussed its practical qualities even though it was in the Chit Chat forum. So I know you have it in you.