How come tied shoelaces love to untie, but clumsily packed away wires love to knot themselves?
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It’s a bit of confirmation bias. You don’t remember the 5,950 times your shoes stayed tied, because you tied em and went about your day, why focus on ur shoes? But the 50 times they’ve come loose, you noticed and focused on it and got peeved as you retied.
So your memory has 0 instances saved of you remembering your shoes stayed perfectly tied, and your memory has 50 instances of remembering your shoes came untied.
Your memory is betraying you, you are falling prey to that bias.
Same with wires. If you grab a wire from the pile and it comes out clean, you just plug it into whatever and continue your day without even thinking about it. No problems, no focus, no memory of it. If you pull the wire and it gets stuck and you get a little pissed off “fuck why can’t it just come free?!?” Now you have a problem, you are focusing on it, you form the memory.
It’s the same reason when you decide you really want the new Bronco, you start seeing them everywhere. And you think everyone has one… but around those 12 broncos you saw this week you also saw probably 500+ toyota camrys or honda accords. You don’t care about those, so they dont get noticed, and your biased brain makes biased memories and warps your reality
Well, both of these clearly follow [Sod’s Law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sod%27s_law), so it is inevitable.
Another explanation could be likened to [entropy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy) – there are single states where they are perfectly ordered and to your liking (tied laces, straight cable), but many, many more states where they are sub-optimal. Over time and with some energy input, they are more likely to be found in a disordered state.
Put simply because there’s more ways to do that than there is the alternative.
For wires, there are only maybe 2 or 3 configurations that we would consider to be “untangled” but there are billions of different ways to be tangled. So if you put them in a draw, move the drawer around, etc, you’re essentially randomising the configuration. Since theres more tangled configurations than untangled ones, statistically, you’re much more likely to end up with a tangled one.
With shoelaces, a similar thing is happening. There is only one way for it to be tied, but a bunch of ways for them to be untied or tangled unhelpfully. So every movement nudges the laces randomly, and statistically you’re more likely to move in the direction of being less tied up, eventually leading to them untying themselves.
Just putting it simply without going too deep into the science: when you walk or run there are forces exerted on your shoelaces that can cause them to loosen. Different knot technique can mitigate this. For cables the longer the cable, loosely coiled, then agitated, has a high likelihood of entangling itself. I think i read somewhere that the ideal cable length to prevent self/pocket entanglement is around 30 cm which is really not practical lol
Edit to add:
Shoelaces can be one of two states, tied or untied, and the forces applied are “impact” from walking and running. A loose cable in a pocket has one state of being untangled, but almost infinite ways to be entangled, and the forces different. It’s more agitation from rubbing against other things in your pocket or from your leg
Well Just First of all
Do the normal shoe lane tying thing
Then as you’re about to finish up
Pull one of the loops thru the center knot hole an extra time.
Then pull both loops tight as you normally would.
The result will be a shoe lace knot that won’t come undone on its own, that is not a ‘double knot’ that will come undone by pulling a single one of the lace ends, just as a normal shoelace knot would come undone
First of all, there are 2 versions of the shoelace knot based on which way you do the first over/under. One is the correct way that stays tied well and the other is a granny knot that comes undone very easily. You might be making a granny knot by mistake. [This much made fun of TED talk on the subject is actually legit super useful](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAFcV7zuUDA).
Second, the shoelace knot is quite a complex knot because you need to be able to easily pull it open. The type of knot you get from random cables looping around themselves is a simple knot. You could tie your shoelaces like that, but then you’d have a very hard time untying them.
Third, the exposed parts of the shoelaces aren’t all that long, and are fixed at one end. If you had cables of roughly that length just dangling from the back of your PC they probably wouldn’t get tangled either. When you have long cables with both ends loose in your draw they have more opportunity to get looped, then when you try to pull them out you tie the loop tight.
Shoelaces are tied with a quick release knot that’s designed to come apart easily if you pull on the tails.
In my experience your average shoelace is also shinier than your average cable, so they slide more easily against themselves.
If you stored a few dozen shoelaces made out of rubber haphazardly in a drawer they would tangle, too.
You are probably tying a granny knot instead if your shoe laces undo themselves. https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm
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