Avatar

Just a Blog

@mmfdftw / mmfdftw.tumblr.com

Just a blob with just a blog. 29. Loves MMFD, GoT, SPN, OINB, Sense8, Glee, and Unbreakable, among several other fandoms. Several other random things and fandoms will be re-blogged here. Life's changed a lot since this little blog was started. Ask is always open~ Fanfic sometimes occurs. Welcome! Feel free to talk to me anytime. :)
Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
hydehart

Happy New Years Everyone!!!

i’d like to think that my new years resolution is to draw more often but i know thats not going to happen lol

Avatar
2008: wow I was so stupid last year
2009: wow I was so stupid last year
2010: wow I was so stupid last year
2011: wow I was so stupid last year
2012: wow I was so stupid last year
2013: wow I was so stupid last year
2014: wow I was so stupid last year
2015: wow I was so stupid last year
2016: wow I was so stupid last year
2017: wow I was so stupid last year
to be continued
Avatar

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:

image

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,

image

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.

Avatar
systlin

Someone port Doom to a blanket

I really love tumblr for this 🙌

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.

Avatar
val-mora

Here is a Jacquard loom:

(Image: a picture of a large, antique jacquard loom, with wide punch cards hanging down from the feeder.)

This loom is circa late 1800s, but Jacquard looms were developed in the early 1800s.

Avatar

🐯 🐯 🐯

Avatar
bunjywunjy

good morning everyone have an absolutely furious mongoose

It’s cuter when you recognize that the lion with visible spots is a juvenile. There’s a very high chance the other lion that runs over to investigate is the MOTHER.

The first lion is asking for comfort because she was given a big spook!!! and she needs mommy to tell her it’s safe and ok!!!! (What’s cuter is that mommy clearly reassures her, and goes on to take the parent role of ‘deal with the scream rat in order to protect my large and easily frightened daughter’)

this is all in all an adorable video 10/10

Who Would Win?

Three apex predators

OR

One Screaming Long Boi

Source: mockwa
Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
lifepro-tips

If you want to have a good standing with an employer and increase your chance of being a needed asset do the work nobody else wants to do and get good at it.

Source: reddit.com
You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.