Musings of a Nordic Whale

Natalia Bessmertnova in The Golden Age.

the amount of times i have said these exact words

Ok def was not expecting this level of relatability

*submits this to the library of congress as a culturally, historically or aesthetically significant film*

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

Thank you so much for sharing this!  I’d seen it before, but didn’t save it, and I want to share this with my Girl Scout Cadettes.  We’re doing the Think Like a Programmer leadership journey, and these are great examples of thinking like a programmer without having to do the coding.

Leon François Comerre

French, 1850-1916

Languages of Britain & Ireland, circa 1000 AD.

Colonial America

Africa as depicted in maps from 450 BC to 1887 AD.

A perfect duet.

You will never escape this video as long as I am alive.

Regions of the United States of America

Solar System Embroidery

Ophelie Trichereau on Etsy

omfg that is just too adorable

This kitteh having a little halloween adventure is one of my favourite posts of all time :)

Every fall like clockwork this photo set pops up and we all must reblog it

You know it’s getting close to Halloween when you see it appear :D

This will always be one of my favorite comics ever. It gives me warm fuzzies~

my heart….

Oh little baby kitty ❤️

Alright fine I’ll reblog this one…

my heart is being sent to space

I found out earlier this year that the artist, Heather Franzen Rutten, sells this comic in an adorable little pinted book! You can buy it and support the artist here: https://www.heatherfranzen.com/shop

A better story about children’s fears.

Attack…

What dimension is that bird coming from

I think the drone has multiple panoramic cameras, meaning the eagle literally figured out where its blind spot was most likely to be by the angle of the lenses and then SWOOP

I watched the video on loop easily 20 times and it straight up comes out of nowhere

Tobias taking out a Yeerk drone

let’s not forget the tacky patterns, too

oh yeah

oh fuck yeah

(TELL ME that last one isn’t a steampunk look. just try and tell me)

yes! thank you, these are EXACTLY what i meant. tomorrow I’ll take a picture of the bafflingly tacky goldenrod-and-maroon gown I’ve got at the shop

also

this is wise, and correct.

This is 100% true.

Oh no, no those are tasteful compared to what wild color shenanigans the 19th century got up to.  Most of them being mid-century are only ~2 colors excepting the plaid.  By the 1890s, five colors per dress was the fashion.  They…didn’t all coordinate the way we would.  

PUMPKIN WORTH

I have seen mid-century dresses in electric blue.  Barbie pink

Black with photo-realistic brocade oranges.  Royal purple with GIANT POLKA DOTS.

Hey hey did you know lime green and lavender was a favorite color combo in 1895?

This one is not so much tacky as…vibrant

Okay at ~1903 it’s not really Victorian but I love the melting ice cream explosion look of it

This dress has faded but it would have originally been a quite eye-catching shade of violet.

Not that past eras were any less fond of colors even if they weren’t artificial dyes.  I’ve seen canary yellow Regency dresses and an 18th century man’s coat in turquoise velvet printed with leopard spots.  Steampunk isn’t really Victorian so much as it is ‘drapery store vomited on a sexy colorblind school marm’

Et le piece de resistance…

Yes, those orange blocks are outlined in green chenille fringe.

brb, saving that green one to my ‘Malfoy estate sale’ pinterest board

Steampunk isn’t really Victorian so much as it is ‘drapery store vomited on a sexy colorblind school marm’

Pair a brightass fushia dress with a top hat and gears you cowards

MORE PUMPKIN ORANGE AND FRINGE YOU COWARDS

If you’re not using blood red and forty pounds of lace and trim what the fuck are you even playing at

The Pragmatic Costumer calls this “The Hot Mess Dress.” It dates from around 1878. They say: “This dress has more trims than my entire collection of detash combined (detash or destash means all the little bits, pieces, and leftovers from crafting something)! On the outside alone I spot: black lace, bi-colored sandy-brown/cornflower-blue ruffles, tawny velvet, cream silk, beaded netting, cream lace, ribbon bows, ribbon rosettes, cornflower-blue buttons, and that fluffy lace collar.  For even more trim-tastic fun and draping pandemonium, here’s a shot of the back:”

The Pragmatic Costumer: “Trims were all the rage in the mid 1870s and 1880s, and this dress is raging harder, faster, and more extravagantly than most.”

And here’s a Worth tea gown from 1895. This really needs to be worn by a mad scientist. Especially one interested in fish.

Nikisha Fogo and Denys Cherevychko in Sylvia