The figure eight knot is implemented in Mathematica as KnotData["FigureEight"].

It is a 2-embeddable knot, and is amphichiral as well as invertible. It has Arf invariant 1. It is not a slice knot (Rolfsen 1976, p. 224).

The Alexander polynomial , BLM/Ho polynomial , Conway polynomial , HOMFLY polynomial , Jones polynomial , and Kauffman polynomial F  of the figure eight knot are

			(1)
			(2)
			(3)
			(4)
			(5)
			(6)

There are no other knots on 10 or fewer crossings sharing the same Alexander polynomial, BLM/Ho polynomial, bracket polynomial, HOMFLY polynomial, Jones polynomial, or Kaufmann polynomial X.

The figure eight knot has knot group

(7)

(Rolfsen 1976, p. 58).

Helaman Ferguson’s sculpture “Figure-Eight Complement II” illustrates the knot complement of the figure eight knot (Borwein and Bailey 2003, pp. 54-55, color plate IV, and front cover; Baileyet al. 2007, p. 37). Furthermore, Ferguson has carved the BBP-type formula for the hyperbolic volume of the knot complement (discussed below) on both figure eight knot complement sculptures commissioned by the Clay Mathematics Institute (Borwein and Bailey 2003, p. 56; Bailey et al. 2007, pp. 36-38).

The hyperbolic volume of the knot complement of the figure eight knot is approximately given by

(8)

(Sloane’s A091518). Exact expressions are given by the infinite sums

			(9)
			(10)
			(11)
			(12)
			(13)

where  is a harmonic number.

 has a variety of BBP-type formulas including

			(14)
			(15)
			(16)
			(17)
			(18)

with additional identities for coefficients of  of the form  (E. W. Weisstein, Sep. 30, 2007). Higher-order identities are

(19)

(E. W. Weisstein, Aug. 11, 2008).

Additional classes of identities are given by

			(20)
			(21)

with additional identities for coefficients of  of the form  (E. W. Weisstein, Sep. 30, 2007). Another BBP-type formula is given by

(22)

 is also given by the integrals

			(23)
			(24)
			(25)

and the analytic expressions

			(26)
			(27)
			(28)
			(29)
			(30)
			(31)
			(32)
			(33)

(Broadhurst 1998; Borwein and Bailey 2003, pp. 54 and 88-92; Bailey et al. 2007, pp. 36-38 and 265-266), where  is a generalized hypergeometric function,  is thetrigamma function,  is the dilogarithm and  is Clausen’s integral.

The question of reading, writing, and making art is related to the question of the senses and their relation.  Which of them is capable of overriding or overwriting the others?  With each new technology, the ratios between them are changed, sometimes radically.  Clearly, we want and need them to corroborate rather than contradict one another.  We are disturbed by signs of enmity between them, as we are disturbed when another’s face and words do not correspond.

Words and images are perhaps very different kinds of machines, time machines, and are often at war.  To turn words completely into graphic images can only happen at very fast or very slow speeds, and it is not clear what one sees when this is done, but it is clear what one feels—lack of access to a code by which particular realities are made manifest.

The process by which something is forced from the land of the living into the realm of the symbolic is perhaps akin to becoming a ghost against one’s will; it means it’s over, perhaps even before it has properly begun.  One begins to see ghosts when one understands that something is about to be lost, and the thing about ghosts is that you can see right through them, but can they see right through you?

What shall we call the aggregation and intensification of as many POVs as possible in one place?  What does such an image look like?  That which contains everything or that in which everything is implicit or complicit may look like nothing—a sovereign grey, as, say, in Atta Kim’s 10,000 Superimposed Photographs, which is about layers, compression, time.  Consider invisibility in this light.  Consider the labor of imagination.  Consider art.  One must have patience for nothingness, which is not nothing. 

Artist’s books can be seen as eulogies for writing.  They ritualize, fetishize, and memorialize the moment at which writing begins its precipitous fall even as it is said to be transformed into an image.  Forces become images at the moment of their probable disappearance.  

If we want to schematize the relations between reading, writing, and making images as a Venn diagram, as suggested, we might say that reading comprises the overlap of the circles, for we say that we “read” a text, and we say also that we “read” an image, which means that we see the so-called world of appearances as something that requires decoding.  The major assumption underlying this notion is the ubiquity of deception, an understanding of deceit, including self-deceit, as a fundamental problem of life.  Is the crucial notion of richness or inexhaustibility simply an idealized or spiritualized version of shape-shifting, the endless game of predator and prey, the plight of Scheherazade?

The circles of this diagram might best be thought of as spheres gyrating at various tempos, producing small overlaps on occasion and changing all the time not independently of one another but only in relation to one another—changes that are often shockingly abrupt due to the sudden manifestation of new technologies that do various things with and to time: cut it up, slice it, splice it, stretch it out, slow it down, speed it up, interpolate it, liquefy it, solidify it, try to remember it, forget about it, get rid of it, get lost in it, dissolve into it, escape from it, make it fly.

We can say that a word is a kind of image that one is able to read or decode only by forgetting or overlooking its graphic quality through sheer habituation.  If there is no habituation, then, obviously, one reads in a very different way; moreover, we can say that even among very strong readers, the degree of conscious or unconscious preoccupation with the graphic elements of writing differs, perhaps radically.  Paradoxically, we can perhaps claim the same thing to no small degree about images in general or certain types of images.  This is, obviously, a matter of surface and depth or surface and volume; and the history of this problematic has yet to be written.

If abstraction is a form of iconoclasm, then reading is an iconoclastic act—it requires looking beyond or looking through the shapes and forms of characters and, in general, ignoring them as such.  Again, one must wonder to what degree this may be true of looking as a whole.

Is reading like looking through a veil and forgetting the veil is there?  Is it like looking through a see-through blouse?  I use this provocative example to suggest a possible conformation of human sexuality and reading and writing.  And with it, I mean to say more than simply that reading and writing are erotized activities, combinations or mergers of naturalism and artificiality.  This would not be going nearly far enough.

Reading, writing, and drawing rely heavily on contrast.  The strong connections between writing and drawing in this respect should be clear.  With the replacement of pen and paper with keyboards and liquid crystal display monitors, we now control the level of contrast in a less immediate and less corporeal way.  There is no connection between how one types and what appears on the screen, and contrast is now a setting, a variable, a purely optical element.  With a primitive pencil, one could control the thickness and darkness of line—its emotivity, its body, so to speak.  Even a branch would do—indeed, especially a branch would do!  Writing or drawing was a way of touching things.  People like to touch things they love or to which they are attracted.

People think of monitors as eyes or even doubled eyes, two-way televisions, and that is, of course, what they are becoming.  A writing pad has never before doubled as a surveillance device, and once this new state of affairs becomes clear, it may turn writing simply into another form of exhibitionism.

The role of instinct in vision is not entirely clear, nor is the role of ideality.  It is not certain that the movement involved in reading is radically different than that inherent to the notion of grace.  We train our eyes on something like Paradise, and only then are we able to see.  This is one way to think about things.  Conversely, what would Paradise look like if there were no writing?

The Tower of Babel is, as we know, a fable about language, but it is also an image.  Literal and figurative at once, it is a structure that seems to invite climbing; and one can imagine being both inside and outside it at the same time.  Importantly, it is an image formed by words, or so we assume.  Perhaps, this is what a fable is or does—it turns words into images, and the optical qualities of the image begin to overtake the linguistic elements that made it possible.  The most enchanting images of the Tower of Babel are those that make it seem as though the structure might begin to spin or even take off like a rocket.

At the simplest level, language—consciousness and culture as well—is something like an erector set.  See Arendt.  It is constructed, cantilevered out into space.  It is a kind of bootstrap phenomenon, a scaffolding project, a prosthetics of transcendence, a perpetual game of pick-up sticks.  All of it is exceedingly fragile–one feels the possibility of its crashing as a constant threat.  I am not sure if this spatial or architectonic paradigm is still operative in the same way as it once was.

Someone looks at another with a tender, violent longing, and the world begins to spin.  What does this look look like, and how on earth does it mean anything?  No one could possibly ever say, and, quite possibly, that is all well and good.  This is perhaps the quintessential Image, the Ur-Image, and what it wants is more; indeed, it desires its own eternity.

Why do we speak of “reading” other people’s faces, as if decoding them like a book?  We also say that eyes “speak.”  To say that an emotion “crossed” his face, on the other hand, renders faciality as something like a film screen.  Our understanding of the face is influenced but not entirely determined by various media.  The face is not so much like a monitor or interface as it is like the skin of an octopus, a pre-linguistic erethism . . . a subject-object.

The face is the most primitive and the most reliable of all lie detectors and the source of every notion of truth.  The reciprocal camouflage or melding that happens between two beings that seek communication in the sense of communion is a skill honed over millions of years.  Note how in avid conversation, they incline toward one another, almost touching–they align, entrain, mirror, assimilate.  In some cases, they like the new image they have made, which belongs to neither and both of them, and they want it to last forever.

What one sees in another’s eyes happens in a split second, and it is not ironic; indeed, it is virtually deceit-proof.  Irony is a literary phenomenon.

To veil one’s eyes is a possibility, but to make them lie outright is a feat difficult for anyone but a psychopath.  And if the world is a matter of reading, what do eyes do before the age of six?  Perhaps, the appearance of this notion of reading marked the moment at which we no longer understood each other, the moment at which we became incomprehensible to one another.  We are forever trying to get back to a world of lost intimacy, notes Bataille—this is the theory of religion.

To know someone means to have a total image of him or her, any form of love or true knowledge being a total-person phenomenon.  To be someone’s friend means to give him back his own image, his most glorious image, sometimes combined with one’s own, in and through as many of the senses as possible.

It cannot even be imagined how differently we see the world.  Were the radicality of these differences to be made manifest in enduring, undeniable form, the world as unity would scatter and fall into millions of tiny pieces.

Almost everyone is a speaker of a so-called natural language, and this ability requires a kind of acoustic mirroring, one could say, between the world and the cavern of one’s own mouth and, in general, the space of one’s own head, the one part of the body that one can see only through the eyes of another or with the aid of a mirror, natural or artificial.  One could invent an apparatus that would allow one to see oneself all the time without interruption from a particular POV, say, that of the ideal interlocutor, so that an objective view of oneself would always be possible.  Conversely, one could modify the reflection in order to make it tolerable.  This kind of mirroring could be done for all the senses.  The minute this Apparatus would be implemented would spell the end of human communication.

Many people become readers, and it is no small thing to become a reader, for it requires, as Kittler reminds us, a complete rewiring of the human brain.  There’s nothing particularly natural about it.  To write requires something far more radically unnatural than does reading.  It is like squeezing blood from a turnip, and this is why there are relatively few writers, and this is why writing is endangered.  What is required is not only an exquisite sense of timing, the transformation of processes into what Flusser called scenes and scenes into processes, but also the daily practice of sacrifice, by which one means pulling things out of the world of appearances into another sphere of being.

“To seize fire or to give oneself to fire, to annihilate or to be annihilated, to follow the Prometheus complex or the Empedocles complex,” Bachelard writes in The Psychoanalysis of Fire, “such is the psychological alternation which converts all values and which also reveals the clash of values.”  To write is precisely to seize and to give oneself to fire.

Reading, writing, and making are all gerunds, verbs turned into nouns, with the emphasis on process and continuity.  Of the three, only making begs an object, the emphasis being both on process and product, or a particle, as in making off, making up, making out, making through, making onto, making into, making do.  Alone, the word implies an entire cycle of action—conceiving, creating, doing, developing, maintaining, sustaining.  It is primitive and fantastic.

There are people who turn themselves into images so that every time you look at them, you think you’re seeing something like a Cheshire Cat.  That’s all right, one supposes, but then there are the ones who want to turn not only themselves into an optical illusion but you as well.  No one wrote about this regrettable state of affairs better than Levinas in a section of Totality and Infinity entitled “The Anarchy of the Spectacle:  The Evil Genius.”  “The spectacle of the silent world of facts is bewitched,” he writes; “every phenomenon masks, mystifies ad infinitum, making actuality impossible.  It is the situation created by those derisive beings communicating across a labyrinth of innuendos which Shakespeare and Goethe have appear in the scenes of sorcerers where speech is antilanguage and where to respond would be to cover oneself with ridicule.”

The senses can be at war with one another within a person, and people can also catalyze this state of war, or fragmentalization, within each other.   The so-called Evil Genius celebrates the war of the senses.  Do you believe his lying eyes or his lying words?  He pits word and image against each other in order to make the other go half-mad or just in order to repeat the process of indecidability ad infinitum in order to prevent anything new from happening.  What is the subject of his doubt?  Her eyes?  Her mouth?

To respond to him would be to cover oneself with ridicule.

Let me add quickly that, practically speaking, there are no Evil Geniuses or, rather, their number is exceedingly small.  Most evil in the world is not a matter of genius.  On the contrary, it is a matter of stupidity or indecision.  There are media that facilitate such states of mind.

The arts, like the senses with which they play, are symmetrical neither in terms of scope nor intensity nor compulsive power.  Sometimes, however, the distinctions between them simply disappear, and they are no longer at war with one another.  This is not a matter of special effects but, rather perhaps, another instance of seeing through.  We must be careful of the way in which we talk about things.

Every media war is, to no small degree, about time, this thing, this ultimate medium, that can be used up even when one is not paying attention to it or perhaps especially when one is not paying attention to it.  Pleasure and joy are an application of Zeno’s law, a reversal of the arrow of time or, rather, the introduction of a vertical element into horizontal time.  The bottom of the moment drops out into a freefall.

In contrast to the instantaneity of the still image, words are strung along or strung out—a potentially endless stream of permutations until they become contained in the form of a book.  This containment, this restraint and constraint, far from being a handicap, is the very condition of perfection—it means that something has begun to circle round itself, form a constellation.  What is remarkable about a book is the ostensible arbitrariness of the decision as to where language is cut, for, again, conceivably, a book could run on forever like a piece of celluloid.  The paradigm or prototype of language is, obviously time conceived as a river.  The paradigm or prototype of a book is the human life span, as when one says, “His life was cut short” or “It cut five years off her life,” or when one speaks of the Thread of Life or the notion of the Fates or even, perhaps surprisingly, of sex, etymologically tied as it is to incision, precision, decision, indecision, and so on.

Writing should not suffer the same fate as life.  It should exhibit no weakening, attenuation, dragging on, half dead, half alive.  The analogue of this conviction in visual terms is montage, which elevates certain moments in time over others as the truest and best because of their sheer intensity.  This is, notably, not the same as idealism, or is it?  The antithesis of this philosophy of life is real-time phenomena, which retard or sometimes inhibit completely the process of representation.

Make a mental note:  Remember to remember.  Don’t forget to answer the question as to why or why answering the question Why? should be questioned when it comes to art, love, or happiness.  The poet does not describe things, Bachelard noted; she exalts them.  Why does she do that?  Because she loves them.  Why does she love them?  Because they make her head spin.

Powerful words and images are spinning things capable of creating constellations around themselves.  A history of spinning things would include everything from pinwheels to planets to love.  Such things do not properly belong to History.

Art interpolates the past, present, and future in order to open up the possibility for something new to enter the world—a minor mystery, this, as Arendt made clear over and over again by asking the question, How does something new ever enter the world?

Something capable of spinning forever is a planet, a god, . . . or a symbol.  A vortex or whirligig or one of those perpetual motion machines suggests a certain kind of constancy, continuity, immortality.  Being round, it looks the same from any POV.  It has no front or back.  It is a thing so powerful that everything around it is commandeered into its orbit.  This is the meaning of attraction or compulsion, the most fundamental law of the universe.

It is no small task to try to figure out the new relations obtaining between words, images, and objects; new relations between codes; new relations between the senses themselves or what it is that we know about them.  There are different forms of intelligence, and it is a mistake to see them as sharing the same assumptions about the world, about what we know as value.  The fight for dominance that has waged between words and images and their respective priesthoods has changed its shape to such a degree that is has become virtually unrecognizable.  Words and images now ostensibly collaborate and even collude with one another against new intruders.

Anyone capable of synthesizing disparate, warring media; of harmonizing clashing temporalities and tempos, transforming them into rhythm and easy continuity, is a minor god, a redeemer worthy of cultish devotion.

What is at stake in this struggle is precisely the fate of sense-based intelligence.

One could, if one were so inclined, see all of this as a form of the so-called battle of the sexes.

Art messes with time, bends it backward and forward, this way and that, until Fate is transformed from a straight line into a circle and then begins to move and spin, and the Fates no longer know where to cut the thread of life and, for the moment at least, give up.

The problem with computers is that they like straight lines and don’t understand curves.

Art gives us courage, exaltation itself being perhaps a form of death-defiance.  It lifts persons, places, things, and sometimes even single moments if they are powerful enough up into another world where they live forever.

The summer day is exquisite, and the exquisite, as we know, contains within itself, by definition, a certain quotient of pain.  When a moment of perfection is reached, sadness is activated.  That which has not reached perfection but is headed in that general direction is called happiness.  It is not self-sufficient but, rather, needs something, and has that something in its line of sight; it is not yet aware of itself as happiness.  And in this respect, true happiness, too, is a form of looking through or looking beyond.  Perhaps, this is what Benjamin meant when he wrote, “It has always been one of the primary tasks of art to create a demand whose hour of full satisfaction has not yet come.”

You really must pay attention:  This moment will never cross your path again, will never be yours again.

Art is the anticipation of bliss, a richness and inexhaustibility of possibilities, an intimation of immortality, and plenitude, as in the countless still lifes of cornucopias, of tables bowed with the weight of grapes, pomegranates, plums—fecundity, or ripeness, as supreme principle.  This is an image, a series of images.  Words must express this principle in a different way, through accumulation and sequencing, through a different handling of time.

We are permeated by the senses and the anticipation of the senses.  Through them, we go from world to world, sometimes painlessly.  Without them, everything would be separated by the deepest of abysses.  In the depths of half-sleep, we smell food and fire.  Through half-opened eyes, we watch the beloved figure at the stove, playing with fire, transforming the world through quotidian fire.  With this image, this scene, we are beyond the dichotomy of word and image; all the senses conspire in it.  They are indivisible, and it makes no sense to try to separate them—standing figure lit by the morning sun, the clinking of dishes, the smell of food, silken covers, the morning song of morning birds.  We are still half asleep—all of this awaits us in full.  Indeed, it beckons us into another world.  Love is stronger than death.

Tomorrow morning, we will feel the same need, the same hunger, and we will be happy to feel it.  To feel it is to believe it and to believe in its reality.  Everything is repeatable but never the same.  “Man is happy to have needs,” writes Levinas.  “A being without needs would not be happier than a needy being, but outside of happiness and unhappiness.”  Art demonstrates in the sensual world the anticipation of fulfillment and fulfillment as the anticipation of eternity.  It creates the new, the possibility of the impossible.

How does it do this?  A circle, a very round circle, is drawn around something, and compelled by forces of attraction the origin of which is unknown—and, accordingly, technically fictitious—the thing begins to rotate and then to spin.  One sees through it, but what is it exactly that one sees?  At some point, its speed rivals and ultimately surpasses that of the rotation of the earth.  This is how new things enter the world, not exactly from somewhere else but from the here and now through a kind of sanctification or exaltation.  This is how new things enter the world, and it is also how we might begin to understand the best way to go about learning how to leave it.

___________________________________________________________________________

Sources

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition.  Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire.  Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.

Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion.  New York: Zone Books, 1992.

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility.”  The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media.  Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008.

Vilém Flusser, Writings.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority.  Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.

This essay was originally commissioned for the catalogue for the exhibition Reading.Writing. at Gallery HOMELAND in 2011. Anne Marie Oliver is the co-chair of the Critical Theory and Creative Research MFA program at PNCA.

The unit of the poem is therefore the page and not, as in other poems, the line. There are, I repeat, many themes on each page, each in its own type and they should be read one after another, from left to right and from top to bottom (as one instinctively does). But, this having been done, every page should be considered in its entirety, as though it were a picture. It has its own composition and the manner in which the words are arranged, their proximity or distance from the principal theme, has an intellectual significance.

The creation of this new poetic form was in itself a work of genius. Nevertheless Mallarmé has had few imitators. This is because, apart from its singular construction, the Coup de Dés presents three kinds of difficulty: 1) philosophic meaning; 2) The poetical symbolism; 3) The grammatical construction. Without attempting a complete analysis I would like to help the reader to overcome these three obstacles.

Now absolute thought, resulting from chance, can only be chance becoming conscious of itself, of its idea, its law, its entirety, that is to say, of its nothingness.

The Coup de Dés was written in 1898; the main ideas had already been expressed in Igitur in 1869. Let us begin by defining the essential terms. ‘Coup de Dés’ means: thought. The poem makes this clear: “Toute pensée émet un coup de dés.” Now for the word “hasard;” it retains the meaning which it had in Igitur: the incidence of life and death in time (“le déroulement dans le temps des fluctuations de la vie et de la mor”). The waves of the sea are a natural symbol thereof. Bear in mind that in the game, as thus conceived, death always wins in the end. As a reault the word “hasard” acquires the meaning: extinction, annihilation, impersonality. Mallarmé speaks of “la neutralité identique de gouffre”—the indifferent neutrality of the abyss, into which everything falls. The waves rise only to fall again and in truth nothing has happened. What then becomes of the principal theme of the poem? “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” may be translated as: A thought wil lnever conquer non-existence (or, as one may say, death). This affirmation is made without the arguments on which it is based; but they are easily to be found in the deductions of Igitur. What thought could overcome death save absolute thought? Now absolute thought, resulting from chance, can only be chance becoming conscious of itself, of its idea, its law, its entirety, that is to say, of its nothingness. So far from overcoming change, absolute though returns and identifies itself therewith. And since a relative thought could not do more than an absolute thought, a thought will never abolish chance. Q.E.D.

The title of the Coup de Dés is reproduced in the text in the form of a backbone. In between the words of this principal theme there are three headings: Un coup de dés jamais (heading A), n’abolira (heading B) and le hasard (heading C). Let us take them one by one.

Heading A. A shipwreck. In the storm on the sea of chance the master might throw a roll of the dice such as would give him power over the waters. He hesitates; a wave carries him away. His fist, still closed over the unthrown number, rises for an instant above the seas, leaving that supreme knowledge to a possible inheritor.

Heading B. Hamlet. Above the trough in the waves which follows the sinking ship a whirlwind of horror and mirth—“tourbillon d’hilarité et d’horreur: catches the spindrift. The tallest feathres of spray become plumes in the turban of an apparition. Laughter, horror, and irony take shape. Jesting Hamlet points out that if the throw gripped by the jealous old master were indeed the Number of Numbers—absolute thought—it was none the less a chance—le hasard.

Heading C. The abyss and the stars. Only the lapping of waves troubles the surface of the abyss. Nothing has happened after all, and the result would have been just the same if the absolute thought had been born. Nevertheless, over the abyss, a constellation shines which is, perhaps, reckoning some final calculation—“un compte total en formation.”

In his preface to the Coup de Dés Mallarmé says, without further elucidation, that the poem, besides its main subject, has secondary and adjacent themes “outre un motif prépondérant, un secondaire et d’adjacents.” There is no doubt about the principal theme. The secondary theme is, I think, that written in capital italics next largest to the capitals of the principal theme. The main and secondary themes having the same ending make a kind of fork, like two rivers flowing to the same mouth.

“Si c’était le Nombre ce serait

LE HASARD’

UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA”

Thanks to a generous use of very loose grammatical ties—apposition, subordinate clauses, parentheses—the adjacent themes are so freely arranged as to be almost detached. In this way the pages form a kind of picture. If they were printed on a scroll they could be unrolled upon the wall like a Chinese painting.

Fry, Roger. “UN COUP DE DÉS” in The Poems of Mallarme. New York: New Directions, 1951. 283.

The Figure-8 Follow-Through, also called the Flemish Bend and Figure-8 Trace, is the most important knot to learn as a climber. This is the best knot to tie the rope into your harness since it is the strongest climbing knot. It is also easy to check visually to make sure it is tied correctly since each side is a clone of the other. You can tell at a glance if it’s right. We use this knot, I tell my guiding clients, because it won’t come untied and only gets tighter when the rope is weighted.

To begin, pick up a loose end of the rope. Tie a single Figure 8 knot between two and three feet from the rope’s end.

After tying the first Figure-8, thread the end of the rope through the harness loop between your leg loops and pass it up through the harness tie-in point on the waist belt (same waist loop that the belay loop is attached to). Snug the Figure-8 against the leg loops.

Consult your harness instructions for the exact tie-in points on the harness.

Retrace the original Figure-8 with the loose end of the rope, carefully following each part of the original knot. Afterwards tighten and dress the knot by neatening the separate parallel strands and making sure they don’t cross over each other.

You should have a leftover tail of about 18 inches for tying a backup knot. If you don’t tie a backup knot, make sure you have a floppy tail of at least 12 inches so the knot will not undo under load.

After retracing the Figure-8, you should have 15 to 20 inches of rope left. Now you will tie a Fisherman’s Backup knot. This is not a safety knot but a way to keep the original Figure-8 Follow-Through knot tight. The Fisherman’s Backup is the superior backup knot to use because it cinches tight if tied correctly.

First make sure you have about 18 free inches of tail left after tying the Figure-8. Wrap the tail rope twice around the climbing rope, then pass the free end through the coils. Tighten it against the Figure-8. You should have a three-inch tail left.

Lastly, double-check your entire knot and your partners. Now you’re ready to climb!

Source: <http://climbing.about.com/od/climbingknots/ss/Figure8FollowTh.htm>

OK, turn the clown off. This is who was in the White House. This is the, uh, this, this is what I’m giving you an example of what the Obamas have done to America ah culturally and socially. They bring a tenth-rate clown like this in who boasts about that he teaches his children how to, uh, his students, so to speak, at the once ex University of Pennsylvania. It’s become a cesspool, uh, what’s happened there. And talks about uncreative writing and how to plagiarise, you hear? Now, when you have a, uh, uh, plagiarist in the White House you would think having a plagiarist pretending to be a poet in the White House in a poetry event … what is this, like, Abbie Hoffman 2? I mean, this is what I’m talking about here, this is not poetry; this is the debasement of our culture. It’s part of the Marxist class warfare. This is what he does and this is what he does and this is how he does it. You say “what are you going on about?” All right, bring it on, I’m showing you who he had there. It wasn’t just the rapper, he has this putz there talking about teaching children, uh, you can’t write anything creative and original, you have to plagiarize everything you turn in. This is a teacher in a college. This is what’s going passing now for a college teacher. It goes back to Obama inviting a so-called college teacher who teaches children to te- to write uncreative writing, where you’re not allowed to write anything original you must plagiarize. It’s the same mentality. It’s the destruction of western civilization. In that sense Obama is acting in a rather s- schizophrenic manner to have a poetry event and invite someone who teaches children that that they must plagiarize. You follow where I’m coming from here?

Right. Yeah.

Alright, it’s a little too esoteric, I get it.

Chinese life is ruled by eight: at eight months a child has milk teeth; at eight years he loses them; at twice eight he reaches maturity and at 64 (8 x 8) he loses the power of procreation.

In Buddhism 8 is a lucky number, possibly associated with the 8 petals of the Lotus, a plant associated with luck in India and a favourite Buddhism symbol.

source: http://mmdelrosario.hubpages.com/hub/numbers