tomorrow

Always reblog NSYNC the day before May

Queueing this for next year

This is Money Marge. Reblog for a miracle of finances to come to you

Ramadan is coming up, so:

- Ramadan is the ninth month in the Hijri calendar.

- It’s considered Holy because it is believed that the Quran was revealed during this month.

- Muslims fast from sunrise (Fajr) to sunset (Maghreb) every day. That means no food, water, cigarettes, etc. during this time. Good deeds are also believed to be “worth more” during this month.

- No, it is not “extreme”; Muslims fast to get closer to God and to become more compassionate. Fasting for several hours a day occasionally has also been proven to be good for your health.

- Muslims who cannot fast should not fast. If you’re sick (or need to take medication), travelling long distance, or menstruating then you shouldn’t fast. Different scholars have different opinions on whether old people and pregnant women should fast, but if you are not able to fast (i.e. would cause you or your body harm) then you absolutely should not.

- If you see someone who you think should be fasting but isn’t just don’t mention it? It’s not your place, and it’s really awkward having to explain to someone you barely know that you’re on your period (totally not based on personal experience).

- “Have a bite! I won’t tell ;)” is not cute. Your friend is fasting for themselves and for their faith. They do not need “saving”.

- “Can I eat in front of my fasting friend?” probably best if you just ask them if it bothers them.

- Iftar is what Muslims call the meal you break your fast with and Suhoor/Sehri is the meal Muslims will have late at night or very early in the morning to prepare for the next day.

- Muslims celebrate Eid al-Fitr when Ramadan ends.

Ramadan Kareem!

HOLY SHIT, IT WAS THE ORIGINAL ONE

MAKE A WISH

the first post ever on tumblr

I WAS EXPECTING IT TO BE A REMAKE OF SOME SORT HOLY FUCK

WHO THE FUCK KEEPS BRINGING THIS BACK

World Heritage Post

hey so, as a man who works with other men, here’s a quick relationship tip: if he doesn’t much like cats, that might be just a personal preference. if he hates cats, if he tells you he hates cats as soon as he hears that you have a cat and love your cat, he’s an asshole. he’s telling on himself.  

every guy i’ve ever worked with that makes a point of telling me how much he hates cats as soon as i mention that i have a cat and love my cat, is always someone who is regularly cruel for fun and who laughs in the breakroom about the mean things they do for fun to their girlfriends and children. 

I wish I could articulate all the ways this makes sense and why it makes sense and stuff but it’s just like… something something misogyny something something resentment of creatures that don’t need you and don’t hang on your attention and approval all their lives.

My dad gave me this exact same advice when I was a kid. “Anyone who hates cats is a control freak and an asshole.”

Source

World Heritage Post

the reason old memes always come back is because, in order to truly destroy a meme, you must cast it into the fires of mount doom and sadly

World Heritage Post

I reblogged this last month, tagged it, and said “might as well see if it works.” I used this video as a reference to find all the forms that i needed (which is A LOT, especially if you’re a dependent) and sent them through the mail, not really allowing myself to hope.

dude.

$2,714 of medical debt from my top surgery - gone. im shaking this was such a weight on me for 2 years and it fucking worked. what the fuck.

Fighting Covid When Kept Home

This was shared on a Covid survivor group…have heard many of these before but it seems helpful: HOW TO FIGHT COVID AT HOME when you are not hospitalized.

“When the nurse came in to discharge me, I asked her, What can I do to help fight this at home? She said:

1. Sleep on your stomach at all times with Covid. If you can’t sleep on your stomach because of heath issues sleep on your side. Do not lie on your back no matter what because it smashes your lungs and that will allow fluid to set in.

2. Set your clock every two hours while sleeping on your stomach, then get out of bed and walk for 15-30 min, no matter how tired or weak that you are. Also move your arms around frequently, it helps to open your lungs. Breathe in thru your nose, and out thru your mouth. This will help build up your lungs, plus help get rid of the Pneumonia or other fluid you may have.

2. When sitting in a recliner, sit up straight - do not lie back in the recliner, again this will smash your lungs. 

3. While watching TV - get up and walk during every commercial.

4. Eat at least 1 - 2 eggs a day, plus bananas, avocado and asparagus. These are good for Potassium. 

5. Do not drink anything cold -  have it at room temperature or warm it up. Drink Pedialyte, Gatorade Zero, Powerade Zero & Water with Electrolytes to prevent you from becoming dehydrated. Water with lemon, and little honey, peppermint tea, apple cider are good suggestions for getting in fluids. No milk products, or pork. (as a singer I know milk products produce phlegm and always advised my students to have none for 3 days before a performance)

6. Vitamins D3, C, B, Zinc, Probiotic One-Day are good ideas. Tylenol for fever. Mucinex, or Mucinex DM for drainage, plus helps the cough. Pepcid helps for cramps in your legs. One baby aspirin everyday can help prevent getting a blood clot, which can occur from low activity. 

7. Drink a smoothie of blueberries, strawberries, bananas, honey, tea and a spoon or two of peanut butter. 

We always hear of how Covid takes lives, but there isn’t a lot of information out there regarding how to fight Covid when you are not critical. I hope this helps you or someone you know, just as it has helped me.”

(Wow, @thetimetostrikeislater  wish you’d had this info when you were ill)

@cptdorkery  @fortheloveoftrekuniverse  @peridotsarelongterm

I definitely wish I had this info when I contracted Covid back in March😓 it was so hard on my lungs! and I couldn’t go to the hospital because it was too full. Stay safe my friends.

Definitely always talk to your doctor before taking any internet health advice, but this sounds like some good ideas.

btw… important PSA: cutting off the mold on the surface of food does nothing. you can only see the spores on the surface, but mold itself has spread and grown roots into the food. by the time you can actually *see* the spores, that piece of food is completely full of it. youre still eating mold. 

many of which are poisonous and have been shown to cause cancer. youre not even supposed to sniff it, because that can get spores into your lungs. like if you look up the health and safety guidelines for mold they barely stop short of telling you to put on a hazmat suit. 

like produce is okay as long as you cut around it at least an inch, but cooked foods? you gonna die. stop eating mold people 

does that include bread

yes

Here’s the USDA mold chart

VERY IMPORTANT INFO FRIENDOS!!!!!!!!!!!!

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.

@we-are-threadmage

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.

(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.

Don’t hide this in the tags, @drylime :D

Vintage on disability rights.

Don’t let the black and white trick you. The Capitol Crawl was in 1990. This is not ancient history.

This was in 1990.

Just Indian things

Do werewolves gain and lose nipples when they transform?

“I am not warranting that with an answer, Sirius. Please go to sleep.” - Remus Lupin, 2:25am, 3rd year boys’ dormitory, Gryffindor Tower.

I don’t know who wrote this or why, but this writing is just *chef’s kiss*

**Editing to add: I now know that this was said by Lindy West in her book The Witches are Coming. Good to know! 

This is gold!!!

brebre.lee

Black version of black widow 🕷❤️🖤 ( fun fact: this is my first year dressing up for Halloween and I made this costume ) 

@shellhaeds

Say hello to Cashew

@okayseal

@shellhaeds 💙💙💙

If you're living in Georgia, early voting has started for the Senate runoff race. Get out there if you can, and make sure your voice is heard. Mitch McConnell needs his power stripped away for the benefit of our country!

Early voting in Georgia runs from 12/14/20 - 01/01/21!