Braid
since October 2026
The braid down the home page's margin is a few parts: threads, one rule for which goes over, a knot, the threads the works hang from, growing tips, vines. Here they are taken apart, then put back together in forms the home page would never use.
Parts
Forms
Aa ring
The braid closed on itself. A press sends a pulse both ways round; unlike the home braid's pluck it does not fade with distance, so the halves meet on the far side and run on until they fade. Meanwhile the strands flow round through each other.
Click the ring. With a mouse, run the pointer along it.
Bb many
Any number of strands, tied at both ends, and the home braid's one rule weaves them all: every strand swings as wide and turns as fast as the others, so two that meet always swing opposite ways, and one of them is always heading up, which the rule sends over. Pile them up instead and the weave is gone.
Click to pluck it.
Cc rope
The braid as the thing it draws: three strands wound round an axis in space. Seen from the front, the strand coming toward you is always the one heading right, so the rule on the home page is what a twisted rope looks like. It turns and tips on its own until you take hold of it.
Drag sideways to turn it; with a mouse, drag up or down to tip it until you look down its length.
Dd drawn
The braid laid along any line. Where the line crosses itself the rule still sorts each strand by which way it swings, blind to which pass it is on, so the two passes cut through each other.
Drag to draw your own. Tap the braid to pluck it.
Ee tassel
The braid's other end, untied. Below the binding nine threads hang free, each a chain of points under gravity and a little moving air.
Run the pointer through the threads, or take hold of one and pull.
Ff harp
Threads hung from a braid and tied down to a curve, longest on the left. Each plays a note of a pentatonic scale, lower the longer it is, in its texture's tone: the single line a plain tone, the double line a doubled one, the dotted line a tone that breaks up.
Sweep across the strings, or press one.
Gg overgrown
As if everything had grown out of everything: seven vines on one braid, each coiling wider the lower it reaches, through the others. Their fruit ripens and swings.
Click to shake it: most of the ripe fruit falls, and grows back.
What they showed
The rule that weaves the home braid never needed to know there were three strands. Strands that swing as wide and turn as fast as each other always swing opposite ways where they meet, so the rule always has one of them to send over, however many there are (Bb).
It is not a drawing trick either. It is what a rope looks like from the front: the strand heading right is the one coming toward you (Cc).
Along a line that crosses itself, the rule still sorts the strands at the crossing, by which way they swing rather than by depth, so the passes cut through each other (Dd). A braid that weaves through itself has to know its own depth, as the rope does.