Seifert surfaces

Hi folks! My next mathematical project comes from a suggestion from local knot-theorist Julia. The idea is to knit the Seifert surface of a trefoil knot. This will be very similar to a project (http://www.math.uchicago.edu/~mrwright/crochet/) of Matthew Wright's.

So, what is a Seifert surface? There's a theorem in knot theory that given any ('tame') knot, there is an orientable surface whose boundary is this knot. I think there's a good constructive proof of this, which also allows you to find out what this surface is. This surface is the Seifert surface of the knot.
If you want to play with them, there's a very cool program, "Seifert View", which will draw them for you (it's free, but sadly only runs on windows).

So, how to knit this? I think this should be pretty straightforward -- I'll start from the middle of one side, increase outwards to form a disc, then split into three to form the 'struts', before rejoining and decreasing to form the top disc. The magic is that before rejoining the 'struts' at the top, I'll flip them over to give the twist. When I'm done, I'll crochet around the edges to highlight the boundary knot. This way has the advantage of being seamless, though possibly at the expense of making the joins less neat.
I'm also considering threading some wire through this boundary, as Matthew Wright suggests, to give the shape rigidity, and then see if I can hang it as a decoration.

I'm planning to write up a pattern for this one, partly because it should be good and quick and partly because I need to get more practice with the LaTeX pattern formatting package I wrote. Since it's so similar to Matthew Wright's work, though, I'll have to ask him before I go publishing it.
I'm not sure how well this approach would generalise to other knots, I may have to ask Julia about that.

So, let's see how it goes -- should be good and quick, since it will be quite small.
Hugh.

LaTeX and knitting

Hi folks, we've been talking about this on Ravelry for the last week or so, and I thought I should really put it up here too.
The idea has been floating around for some time of writing a LaTeX package which will typeset knitting patterns, although exactly what it will do and how far it should go has been rather harder to pin down.

I decided to give this a go, and put something together. The idea is that it will provide you with simple commands which will provide a basic skeleton to your patterns using (very) simple commands, so you can just write your pattern without having to worry about the formatting, or even work from a template.
The class I wrote to do this is now at a testing stage -- I've got all the commands I thought would be useful, and I now need to see how this works for people writing actual patterns. I'd rather not make it *entirely* public just yet, so we're doing some testing in GeekCraft on Ravelry. If you'd like to try it out, go there and it will redirect you to the files and instructions and things.

The plan is that after a period of testing I'll collect some feedback, make whatever changes people suggest, then I'll stick appropriate "do what you like" copyright notices in it and release it into the wild. (I suppose I should write some proper documentation at some point too.)
I wonder if CTAN would take it? It *is* pretty elementary.
An important thing to note (and someone mentioned on GeekCraft) is that it should be pretty modify-able too -- since it's mostly dealing with style I'm hoping people will personalise it. Nothing in there is hugely complicated, it's mostly just a matter of tidying it out of the way.

So, if it sounds good to you, look out for it in the near future, and if you're on Ravelry you can come give it a whirl and let me know how it goes!

Relatedly (and coming out of the discussion of this, I was pointed to KnitML. I haven't read up on exactly how much it's capable of just yet so I'll write more about it when I understand it better, but it looks like an amazing project -- go check it out!

Hugh.

Blog note

Hmm, spam-bots seem to have found this blog today, so I'll put comment moderation on and see if it clears up at all. This in no way excuses you from posting comments, which is mandatory :op

Hugh.

Hand grenade

Hey -- just a quick post today, but I realise I haven't been updating this much, so I thought I should post some of the little projects I've been doing.
So, on a strange whim I decided to make a hand grenade. I wasn't too sure about this, because it must be pointed out that grenades are vicious and lethal weapons designed to kill people and destroy things. One thing I *didn't* know about them, until I was looking up information for this project, is that the little raised panels (on some grenades, not all have these) are designed to fragment into shrapnel on explosion, killing anyone nearby. I suspect their purpose is a bit blurred by their use in computer games and films, which naturally gloss over that kind of detail.

That said, they are a very powerful symbolism to them too which is quite divorced from this, about power, change and danger (I suppose the same goes for most military things), and that's more what led me to want to knit one. That and because I've been listening to Green Day's "She's a rebel" way too much lately.
The design is pretty simple -- it's a tube, with a bit of tapering at the ends. There's some (not terribly well done) stranding to give the 'panel' effect, and the top part is knit separately and sewn on. It doesn't have a pin, mostly because I want to be able to throw it (seriously, everyone should have at least one knitted toy for throwing at the tv) and, ironically, metal bits would be slightly dangerous for that.
Really it should be quite a lot squatter and more tapered, but it's very recognisable anyway, and the designs for real grenades do vary quite a bit.

So yeah, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, the biggest concern was that the long-ish floats make the stranding a bit difficult.

More than one Wug.

Hi folks.
I've got a strange little project to describe today. A psycholinguist friend was telling me about an experiment called the Wug test, the aim of which is to get children of various ages to form a plural of 'wug', a fictitious animal, among other things. You can see scans of the original images here. You can also buy merchandise, if you're that way inclined.
Aside from being pretty cute, they're fun little nonsense monsters, and they have the weird property that you're not allowed to talk about them in the plural. So, this is the plan -- I'm going to knit a Wug. Then I'll knit another Wug. Then I'll have two of them. I'll probably knit up one or two of the other monsters, which have the other plural sounds.
The patterns will be quick, simple, and prominently feature googly eyes, since they make everything cute.

This is in no way as weird as a psychology experiment having a line of merchandising. Geeks!
Hugh.

Sad news

Hi folks.
Sad news this post -- I've mentioned Knittiana here a few times. She was very ill for a long time, and had been waiting for a heart transplant. We just heard recently that she had died.
She was an inspirational and incredibly brave person, and she meant a lot to the folks in Edinburgh. If you're not an organ donor already, I'd urge you to read about it (here if you're in the UK, or Germany, the US, or Canada). It's a big step, but it's something you should know about before you decide one way or the other.

There'll be more to write about this later, but just now I just want to say that we all miss her.
Hugh.

The Knitter

Exciting news this time!
If you're a regular reader of "The Knitter" magazine, you'll know they do a feature in which they select a knitting group each issue and display a collection of their projects. This edition they've chosen City Knitty, so you can see some of us and what we're up to! One of my long-unblogged hats (the heart-hat, which uses some nifty maths/compsci trickery to convert a heart pattern into polar coordinates) was one of the projects, so it's now officially famous :o).
And since another of the featured projects was Madeleine's Helward's world I got an extra mention too!

Thanks to CK's Georgina for organising this!
Hugh.