It can seem a bit silly to recommend a way to tie your shoes, but some knots are just more secure than others. For decades I have favored two specific shoelace knots: Ian’s Fast Knot and Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot. Ian’s Fast Knot is done so effortlessly as to look like a magic trick, and Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot has never failed me. 

But who is Ian? Ian Fieggen, who also goes by “Professor Shoelace,” is the guy who runs Ian’s Shoelace Site, the internet’s prime destination for learning how to tie your shoes. His website is simple, intentionally focusing on common vernacular over standardized knot terminology, and has been operating as a discrete section of his personal site since 2003. Ian’s Shoelace Site does not need to change; it is perfectly functional the way it is, and people have been discovering his many knots and lacing techniques for decades.

Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot is a double slip knot, only marginally more complicated than the “bunny rabbit” style kids tend to be taught. Though Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot can also be tied incorrectly, it is far more secure than the knot many people tie under most circumstances, which tends to fall apart when tied incorrectly.

Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot is done by doing a standard left over right starting knot, creating two loops (bunny ears), crossing the loops right over left so that one sits over the other, looping both loops over each other and pulling them through the “hole” in center so the loops exit in opposite directions, and neatly tightening the resulting knot. It’s a wonderful compromise between security, convenience, and ease of execution. It does not require a sloppy double knot, which can get easily snarled, and it’s easy to untie with a single pull. There is no perfect knot, but Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot has yet to fail me after over a decade of use.

“I try not to over-sell the merits of this knot,” Ian Fieggen told me over email, “as people have become complacent about every product on earth being touted as ‘the best.’ I reckon that those who blindly follow what they are told end up believing everything and knowing nothing. I'm therefore most pleased when people discover for themselves that the Secure Knot lives up to my claims, especially when (as in your case) it follows a lengthy period of usage.”

There are, of course, other knots. I have seen other people on YouTube and Reddit recommend the Berluti Knot. I have also seen many people who are fans of the Surgeon’s Knot. Ian’s pride and joy, which he claims to have invented and has a page documenting its history, is Ian’s Fast Shoelace Knot, also simply known as Ian’s Knot, which is so rapid that it makes you do a double take. But what makes Ian’s site truly great is not that it documents a few knots, but is a cornucopia of methods for tying and lacing your shoes. Ian’s Shoelace Site is from a different time on the internet, when people simply made websites that they were passionate about. 

The full breadth of Ian’s site is a marvel to behold given its simple subject material. Not only does he passionately cover every shoelace knot he knows, he also covers every factor of lacing: why knots get jammed, aglet repair, user knot ratings and the seemingly countless methods for lacing your shoes. Being a subsection of a personal site, Ian has written extensively about other topics including an history of his father, a computer programmer who passed away in 2022. 

People who know Ian’s Shoelace Site love it. But like all passion projects that seem eternal on the internet, even Ian’s site is vulnerable to the forces destroying the internet.

“Have you ever wondered,” Ian asked, “why websites like mine are disappearing from the Internet?”

He has his theories. The Shoelace Site is kept alive via fairly unobtrusive ads, but he says the rise of ad blockers has made that income precarious. He also claims that people copy the information on his site without attribution, both wholesale and to go viral. A quick search of YouTube and especially TikTok is rife with people doing Ian’s Fast Knot without either knowing or disclosing the source. “Around half the copycat videos on YouTube are tying it incorrectly as a granny knot, which comes loose,” Ian said. “This has given my knot the undeserved reputation of being faster at the expense of reliability!” To the extent that one can “own” a knot, Ian has been robbed.

Ian, more than many writers and publishers on the internet, sees with cold clarity the catastrophic effect of AI on the continued survival of an independent web. “Today, my website is constantly being harvested by AI bots,” he said. “That content is then reused, typically without giving credit, in what amounts to little more than wholesale computerised plagiarism.The search engines, which we previously tolerated showing snippets of our content because they brought people to our websites, are now showing AI generated versions ahead of those snippets. These can be sufficient for visitors to remain on the search website and never end up visiting. Generative AI already allows folks to ask for something – such as a diagram on how to lace shoes with stars – and again, never find my website filled with diagrams on which that AI diagram was based.”

For Ian, the cumulative effect of all of these factors is a deep sadness, a sinking feeling of exhaustion and futility. What is the point of adding value to the internet if it is only going to rob you? Why do research, make diagrams, and develop new knots?

“Why keep feeding the hungry beast that the internet has become?” Ian asked.

Ian says his site is OK for the foreseeable future, kept alive via the occasional donation, ad revenue for people who don’t use blockers, affiliate links, and kind words from strangers. But, like the site you are reading, content that you believe to be immutable and immortal on the internet is constantly in peril. These places only exist when the people investing their time and energy know that they are appreciated, credited, and supported. The whims of companies like Google seek to alter the deal that has kept much of the internet alive, threatening its basic foundations. This is true for blogs, for journalism and for the forum culture that the internet is built on. It even seeks to threaten and consume something as simple and necessary as tying your shoelaces.

As the SAT nears its 100th anniversary, here's a look at how the test has changed since 1926 and how scores on both the SAT and ACT have shifted over time.

Surprise has the extremely special distinction of being both an emotion and a completely quantifiable thing that scientists and mathematicians talk about very frequently. Whenever probability is a thing, surprise is also a thing. It’s true and it’s not even that complicated! Watch:

For some intuition:

• You’re certain the sun will rise tomorrow; you believe the probability the sun will rise is 100% or “1”; we have that -log(1) = 0. So if the sun rises tomorrow, your level of surprise will be 0. That sounds correct!

• If someone flips a coin, you believe the probability it’ll land heads is 50% aka 0.5. We have that -log(0.5) = 0.3; your level of surprise at it landing on heads is 0.3

• If they flip the coin again, and get heads again, your level of surprise is 0.3 + 0.3 = 0.6 surprise. Yes, this actually works, you can just add them, no need to fuss around with subtracting from 1 then multiplying

• To turn that first one around, you believe the probability the sun won’t rise tomorrow is 0% or “0”. We have that -log(0) = ∞. If the sun doesn’t rise tomorrow, your level of surprise will be ∞. Personally, this is pretty intuitive to me!

Hell is other people’s understanding of statistics

People talk about uncertainty in an intuitive way constantly. They use words like “might”, “maybe”, “could do”, “there’s a distinct possibility”. So weaselly! I often wish people would be more quantitative and use numbers. But when I put a percentage on my own uncertainty, people get frustrated. One must have a little sympathy for them: humans don’t intuitively “feel” percentage points. So to reiterate that argument: surprise is something you do feel!

Besides, when they do try to be quantitative…

Don’t hate the thinker, hate the tool for thought

Maybe seeing those makes you despair for humanity so much that you want to avert your gaze from the whole thing. No! Bad attitude! You do not get to give up like that. Even when I tell you that one of them is a Professor of Neuroscience at Stanford 😀

Seriously though - doctors and nurses have to read survival percentage values out all the time. At many points, decisions affecting your life and those of your loved ones have been made based on them. How many lives have been lost to making mistakes like this? You want to make people’s lives better, get them thinking more quantitatively. So: growth mindset for humanity, please. I did not post those quotes so you can complain about them with your enlightened friends. I want you to think of those quotes as telling you what you’re working with if you want to improve things (you want to improve things).

So how do we help those people? We can change their tools for thought. No more probability! Talk about surprise instead!

Maybe: when people see numbers, they want to add them (they expect “linearity”). Then being able to add surprises is a superpower. Let’s give people that superpower by changing education and everyday conversation to use it instead of probability.

Introducing: the Surprice-Dice!

Here’s a funny and helpful thing: it turns out that there is a god-given unit of surprise.

You already know what it means to have a surprise of 0 (“I knew that would happen”) and infinity (“I thought that was impossible”). Well, it turns out there is a thing it means for your level of surprise to be exactly 1.

It’s approximately the level of surprise you have when rolling a 30-sided dice and getting 11 or less. To be more exact it’s 1/e, where e is that number people learned about during COVID. 1/e = 0.367… ≈ 11/30.

So, public information campaign: mass-produce 30 sided dice, with numbers 1-11 colored green and 12-30 coloured yellow. Mail one to every household, we’ll double everyone’s IQ overnight! “1 surprise” is one roll of this being 1-11. “2 surprise” is that happening twice. 3 surprise is 3 rolls being 1-11.

How surprised would you be if the democrats lost the next election? More than 2 rolls, or fewer? And that’s how a civilized person talks in 2026!

(yes, I know, “die” not “dice”. But I am a linguistic descriptivist, get used to it!)

To be honest, a revolution in thought of this kind seems improbable would surprise me more than 6 11/30 rolls. Alas, status quo has us locked into probability. Same as electrons having negative charge, pi vs tau, and 3D geometry should be done with the cross product. Still, you might as well give it a go, in your own head or with your kids 🙂

Appendix: sciencey arguments

1. Entropy becomes much more intuitive: it’s “average surprise”, or “expected surprise” (that phrase sounds sounds so ridiculous and I love it). Think about it: with more ordered and predictable (less entropic) things, the average result is less surprising - duh!
2. Bayes theorem gets oh-so-much-nicer too, it’s just adding and subtracting!
2. This has been said for super duper serious science, not just wishy-washy human intuition!

Gaussians are nicer too:

By the way surprise also goes by the name “surprisal” and “log-odds”, but it maps very directly to the intuitive sense of the word so I don’t know why you’d say that!

Tracking 1,000+ people through the ups and downs of their relationships

Hi!

As long-time readers of the newsletter know, I’m a fan of variant sudoku puzzles — sudoku with strange rules like thermometers, ratio dots, cages, and other things that you’re probably already confused by. Many times, I’ve mentioned and endorsed James Sinclair’s Artisanal Sudoku newsletter, and I’m going to do the same today — and then some. Because James has a book out, and I have photographic evidence that you’ll like it.

This week, I was in Manhattan and early to an event I was attending, so I stopped by Strand, a famous used book store. I went to see if they had any of my books on the shelves and they did, as seen below. And on the same shelf, next to my book (I rotated the image below), is the book I’m here to share with you today — James’ book of 150 handcrafted variant sudoku puzzles.

I didn’t buy his book because I already owned it — I preordered it when he announced it last fall. Easiest impulse buy in recent memory, too, because his puzzles are fantastic. (I didn’t buy my own book either, but it’s sitting there for $10 if you want a used copy. I considered stealthily signing it but I didn’t have a pen on me, and didn’t want to get arrested.)

But don’t take my word for it — try one of his puzzles yourself. Here’s one from this week’s newsletter, which you can play online here:

The rules:

• Regular sudoku rules apply — place the numbers 1 through 9 in the grid nine times each, so that no number repeats in any row, column, or bold-outlined 3×3 box.
• The sum of the digits inside each cage is equal to the small number in the top left corner, and digits cannot repeat within a cage.
• Those grey lines are thermometers. Digits on thermometers increase from the bulb end, and not necessarily incrementally.

Enjoy, and if you like it, consider buying James’ book. And if you’re like me, copy the pages so you don’t have to write in the book itself.

The Now I Know Week In Review

Monday: A Life-Saving Football Blooper: He got a kick (heh) out of this one, and it sent him to the hospital — thankfully.

Tuesday: A Planely Obvious Punishment: Stupid human tricks, with somewhat predictable results.

Wednesday: Why You Shouldn’t Tick off a Tiger: It may not get you right away, but that may not matter.

Thursday: The Boy and the Blue Cup: A heartwarming story.

Long Reads and Other Things

Here are a few things you may want to check out over the weekend:

1) “Inside the Quest to Mine the Bottom of the Sea” (New York Times/gift link, 11 minutes, June 2026). This is very cool, albeit controversial.

2) “How Long Does It Take to Plan a Bridge?” (Construction Physics, 6 minutes, June 2026). The “New Tappan Zee Bridge” listed here isn’t too far from me, and I felt like it took forever. But it only took five years to build plus another 13 to plan, which … OK, kind of does feel like forever. It’s not out of the norm, though.

3) “The Secret Garden of Rock-Paper-Scissors” (The Shamblog, 6 minutes, May 2026). What happens when you add more options to the classic three-option game? He did the math.

Have a great weekend, and let’s go Knicks!

Dan

You didn’t “have a conversation” with ChatGPT.

It doesn’t “think you should…” It doesn’t think.

It didn’t “tell you that…” It doesn’t speak.

It doesn’t “feel that the best option is…” It doesn’t feel.

AI is a cheap parlor trick. You provide words, and it provides words back that are most likely to occur alongside the words you provided.

…

A useful reminder for the next time you’re tempted to personify or humanise an LLM.

LLMs are statistical tools. There are some things that the statistics of language can be good at, especially on average: stuff like summarisation, sentiment analysis, pattern identification, and checking for internal consistency.

But they’re just maths. They’re not a person.

It’s not even that they don’t care about you or don’t want to help you. They don’t even go that far: they’re incapable of “caring” or “wanting” in the first place. What they do is take all of the information they’ve ingested, plus their training and prompt, plus the conversation you’d had with them so far, plus a random number, and produce output which is, after a fashion, a prediction of what comes next.

As always: that’s not to say it’s useless. (It’s also not to say it’s always useful.) But as a tool, it’s pretty opaque to most normal people.

Unless you’ve really taken a deep-dive into understanding low LLMs work, they must seem like magic (hell; speaking as somebody who has taken such a deep-dive, they sometimes seem like magic!). I’m sure that some of the time, they must seem like they’re a living thing, or at least an approximation of one.

But they’re not. And it’s important to remember that.

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