Lacing Shoes

Probably one of the clearest, earliest, and most obvious manifestations of the playful human mind can be found wherever you find the unnecessary - the unnecessarily beautiful quilt or the unnecessarily intricately carved knife handle or the unnecessarily multifunctional can opener. It's as if we're not really giving in to necessity, but rather going it one better. As if we're saying "OK, if I have to do it, I'll do it, but I'll do it better than I have to, I'll make it more beautiful than it needs to be. I'll make an art of it. I'll add needless functionality.

Hence my fascination with this collection of shoe lacing methods." Shoe lacing. I mean, how many ways are there to tie shoes, really? There's the one you're taught. And then there are the 22 described on Ian's Shoelace Site. And then there are, "As an example, take a shoe with 6 pairs of eyelets. Feed through the top left eyelet from either top or bottom (2 ways), then through one of 10 remaining eyelets from either top or bottom (x 20 more ways), then 9 remaining eyelets (x 18 more ways), and so on until the top right eyelet (x 2 more ways). This results in 2 x 20 x 18 x 16 x 14 x 12 x 10 x 8 x 6 x 4 x 2 x 2 ways, a staggering total of almost 15 BILLION ways of running the lace!"

And then there are the six ways to tie shoelace knots.

via in4mador