The Assassin's Water Bottle

It's finally here. The water bottle that can surreptitiously pour two different drinks at the same time. The limited run Founders Edition has nearly run out. But the good news is we've ordered a second run. We've made a few tweaks for the second run because we want the people who got the Founders Edition to feel superior to everyone else. For example, although the Founders Edition is dishwasher safe, we didn't get the certification in time. So, it says on the bottle that it isn't dishwasher safe. That's fun. Also, the accent color is different. and we changed a couple of other things as well. But anyway, when you go to the website, you have a choice between the founders edition, there's not many left, or the new edition, and there'll be a little bit of a wait for that one. But why would you want to buy one? Well, besides the obvious utility of being able to pour two different liquids from the same vessel, the Assassin's Water bottle also comes with loads of hidden features that you can explain to your friends. For example, this cozy option has all these braid designs on it that hold the answer to the question, "What happens when you cut off someone's ponytail?" Look at this design here. It's a set of four lines that crisscross over each other. But actually, if you pick a point on one of the lines and follow it around, you visit all four strands before coming back to where you started. So, actually, it's just one line. That's because all these designs are mathematical knots. Knotted loops of string that can't be undone without cutting. In fact, this is all possible knots you can make with a maximum of six crossings. But here's the interesting thing. If you take some complicated knot like this and try to pull it out into a braided loop, you might end up with these sort of hooks where the string actually doubles back on itself. But James W Alexander II proved that all knots could be made into a braid without any double backs. So these designs are actually the braid representations of the first seven knots plus the unnot. But then I had this question. Typically when you draw a knot as a braid, you do it like this. You don't bother to show the fact that these ends are connected to each other around the back. So my question is, if you braid someone's hair, then cut off that braid and then join the loose ends together, what kind of knot do you have? Luckily, I have an awful lot of this bead chain stuff lying around, which comes with these little links. So let's braid these strands of bead chain like it was hair and then use the links to join the ends together. Okay, so the simplest thing you can reasonably call a braid is just that. And interestingly, if we join the ends together, we end up with the unnot. Okay, so what if we did that move twice? Now, when we join the ends together, we end up with this, which to my eye looks like this one, which is the 41 knot, otherwise known as the figure eight. And look, if I spread it out, that is indeed what we have. Let's do that move three times now, because this is really cool. Each strand ends up in its original position. So, when we join the ends together, we get three separate loops linked together. And beautifully, this linking is called Boromian rings, where you only have to snip one of the loops and all three fall apart. So, there you go. That is just one of the mathematically interesting cozies you can get with the Assassin's Water bottle. Also, the bottle itself has interesting stuff on it, too. Go to inqfactory.com/bottle to get yours. [clears throat and cough]

Get yours here: https://inqfactory.com/bottle