just spent like an hour playing “who’s that pokemon” w my sibling and i was flabbergasted when they couldnt identify like half the pokemon they were seeing. (shrek voice) he didnt even know garganacl
the masses are uneducated . we must bring back the pokerap
In fact, you cannot get a title for a car here without proof if a space off the street in which to park it. Easily one of the best land-use policies out there.
*guy with an undiagnosed disability voice:* haha it’s kinda crazy how everyone just deals with the constant unending pain but we just keep trucking per usual 💯💯💯
So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:
1) Binary files are 1s and 0s
2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches
You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…
You can knit Doom.
However, after crunching some more numbers:
The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…
3322 square feet
Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.
Hi fun fact!!
The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:
Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.
This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer.
But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine.
Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:
But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!
Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,
and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.
tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.
It goes beyond this. Every computer out there has memory. The kind of memory you might call RAM. The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory. It looked like this:
Wires going through magnets. This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily. Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1. Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:
You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is. But these are also extreme close-ups. Here’s the scale of the individual cores:
The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers. Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.
And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon. This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive. It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.
(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)
Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”
I mean let’s also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the “weaver yelling at Draw Boy” technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles “raise these and these, lower these!” and hope that he got it right.
With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY.
ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon.
And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC.
The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, I’ve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They don’t seem interested these days)
This is fascinating. I knew there was a correlation between binary and weaving but this just takes it to a whole nother level.
I’m in Venice, Italy several times a year (lucky me!) and last year I went on a private tour of the Luigi Bevilacqua factory.
Founded in 1875, they still use their original jacquard looms to hand make velvet.
Here are the looms:
Here are the punch cards:
Some of these looms take up to 1600 spools. That is necessary to make their many different patterns.
Here are some patterns:
How many punchcards per pattern?
This many:
Modern computing owes its very life to textiles - And to women. From antiquity weaving has been the domain of women. Sure, we remember Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr, but while Joseph Marie Jacquard gets all the credit for his loom, the operators and designers were for the most part women.
I’ve seen this cross my dash a few times, but I’ve never watched the video before. Maybe I just didn’t pay attention when I was a kid, but I don’t remember ever seeing just how the Jacquard loom works. I just knew that the punch cards controlled which threads were raised. It’s cool to see the how, not just the what.
characters being confirmed autistic or heavily autistic coded and instantly getting infantilized and woobified by fandoms my beHATED
entrapa and peridot get behind me.
“they don’t know what sex is” “to autistic to fuck”
falls to my knees and rips my shirt off screaming to the sky in anguish.
Dude especially if the characters are already kind of innocent or naive. Like papyrus from undertale is a happy, extroverted, flamboyant guy who just wants to help monsters and doesn’t quite realize all the details. But he’s treated like he is a child who doesn’t know or understand anything. Rather than being a fullass adult
In moments like this I always fall back on the fact that they also aren’t speaking English because they don’t have England or the many languages and conquering peoples that contributed to the creation of the English language and therefore the work musr be a translation into recognizable terms in our world’s terms. Call that Tolkien Brainrot.
Definitely funnier if you make fantasy explanations though,
Champagne is a wizard who sells bubbly alcohol.
It’s called English because of the original Lish people, all languages start with En here.
French fries are not potatoes they’re roots of the french plant.
Goodbye is now short for ‘good be your eye’ wishing you luck seeing the path ahead.
Jesus Christ is a long dead lich who used to cause everyone problems and we haven’t stopped saying her name when things go wrong.
i know an engineer-type dude who said fiction bored him, because fiction is mostly-formulaic and tropey, and you can generally guess what’s gonna happen next, and yada yada
so his solution for this problem was… to solely read serial web novels in languages that (1) he did not speak, and (2) for which there was no actual translation, fan or otherwise
apparently, the combined forces of “trying to figure out WTF is going on via the power of Google Translate" + “cultural differences in storytelling conventions” + “the inherent randomness of where the hell amateur authors are gonna take their plots”—those all mashed up to make stories that were unpredictable enough to keep him guessing all the time
then he described to me this totally batshit-sounding Hungarian story he’d been obsessively reading once a week for years
and god i think about him all the time. like. that is the most wild way to process fiction that i have ever heard of, but also, i’ve gotta admire the sheer chaos energy of it
like i tried to tell him suspense isn’t about having no fucking clue what’s going on, it’s about having expectations subverted in novel and interesting ways that nonetheless accord with one’s understanding of the story’s universe, etc
and he’s just like “no. suspense is when i cannot guess what is happening next, full stop. quantum physics is a suspense novel”
Thinking that countries can run on breezes is worse than delusional.
A two-megawatt windmill is made up of 260 tons of steel that required 300 tons of iron ore and 170 tons of coking coal, all mined, transported and produced by hydrocarbons.
They each consume 10'000 liters (more than 2600 gallons) of crude oil based lubricants per year.
When outdated, the wind turbines are being buried deep in forests, out of public view, due to the high costs associated with recycling them.
A windmill could spin until it falls apart and it will NEVER, EVER generate as much energy as was used in building it. 🤔
Did a fuckingoilexecutive write this?
1) Fibreglass is recyclable.
2) The idea that a windmill could never generate as much energy as was used building it is fucking crazy. Mathematically, one is a fixed constant and the other is a rate. If i spend 100 KJ to build a machine that generates 10KJ a year, in ten years it will generate 100KJ and then it keeps generating.
It took me 3 seconds to find an article debunking these stupid evil lies:
Thinking that countries can run on breezes is worse than delusional.
A two-megawatt windmill is made up of 260 tons of steel that required 300 tons of iron ore and 170 tons of coking coal, all mined, transported and produced by hydrocarbons.
They each consume 10'000 liters (more than 2600 gallons) of crude oil based lubricants per year.
When outdated, the wind turbines are being buried deep in forests, out of public view, due to the high costs associated with recycling them.
A windmill could spin until it falls apart and it will NEVER, EVER generate as much energy as was used in building it. 🤔
Did a fuckingoilexecutive write this?
1) Fibreglass is recyclable.
2) The idea that a windmill could never generate as much energy as was used building it is fucking crazy. Mathematically, one is a fixed constant and the other is a rate. If i spend 100 KJ to build a machine that generates 10KJ a year, in ten years it will generate 100KJ and then it keeps generating.
It took me 3 seconds to find an article debunking these stupid evil lies:
Thinking that countries can run on breezes is worse than delusional.
A two-megawatt windmill is made up of 260 tons of steel that required 300 tons of iron ore and 170 tons of coking coal, all mined, transported and produced by hydrocarbons.
They each consume 10'000 liters (more than 2600 gallons) of crude oil based lubricants per year.
When outdated, the wind turbines are being buried deep in forests, out of public view, due to the high costs associated with recycling them.
A windmill could spin until it falls apart and it will NEVER, EVER generate as much energy as was used in building it. 🤔
Did a fuckingoilexecutive write this?
1) Fibreglass is recyclable.
2) The idea that a windmill could never generate as much energy as was used building it is fucking crazy. Mathematically, one is a fixed constant and the other is a rate. If i spend 100 KJ to build a machine that generates 10KJ a year, in ten years it will generate 100KJ and then it keeps generating.
It took me 3 seconds to find an article debunking these stupid evil lies:
did some concept designs for my ver of the bishops and cultist ocs, very much subject to change in my au the bishops get to have their original robes after indoctrination bc i think its COOL
