Nothing shuts down a bougie conversation like “well, when I was homeless—” Nothing. It’s one and done. They are fucking taken out. The conversation is dead. Done.
“there’s enough charities in place to help our homeless population”
Well I was turned away from every single one in the area because I was a non Christian trans person. Not that there were many I could make the walk to, to be fair.
“if someone is homeless, they can just forage for food! Probably eating healthier than we are har har har!”
I was homeless in winter. And yeah, sure, I knew how to use pine needles to make tea and boil bark but. Come on. You think every homeless person has that fucking knowledge or resources? And I was homeless on a mountain. What about people who are homeless in cities? What are they going to forage? Gravel? And what about areas where foraging is illegal? You want them to get arrested? In a police state like this?
“well as long as they don’t get into trouble, there won’t be trouble!”
You make laws criminalizing their existence. The “trouble” they make is surviving. I got the cops called on me because I went for a walk. I had a stick I was using to help me walk because I have a limp and couldn’t afford a cane. A fucking white couple saw me and called the cops and told them I was walking “with a rifle” and was “very threatening”. I got DAMNED lucky that a Light horseman found me first and told me what happened. Laughed a little. Told me not to worry about it, he’d call it in as bogus, and have a talk with the couple. But again. I was lucky. If that had been a state cop and not a rez one, I could have been fucking shot. For walking.
Honestly, if you are not for the liberation of homeless people, if you are not for decriminalizing homelessness and all aspects of it, if you say things like, “now I support those people, but I wish I didn’t have to see it, because it makes me uncomfy,” you have swallowed the propaganda pill. Congrats. You were not immune to it and now you are sick with it.
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.
I am never not amused by the overlap of textiles and technology. Also the fact that a huge number of fiber arts people I know are either in tech or math themselves or their partner is (myself included - husband is a programmer).
contranym-xendo asked:
Born wide eyed and idealistic, once as a child I tool a cold hard look at the world and forgot how to blink. Even as the sharp shards of the cruelty I would witness penetrated my eyes to slip down inside and carve out pieces of my heart, I have not blinked. When witnessing kindness my eyes will well up with a soothing balm of tears, but I still do not blink. My mind never stops racing, it burrows into facts and systems, dives into puzzles, all to escape the nihilism at its heels. How would I do?
Two weeks into the semester, you get something of a start when you find your roommates’ face lying on his pillow without the rest of his body. After a horrified few seconds, you realise that in fact it’s a porcelain mask, painted with such amazing detail that it looks like it would be warm to the touch. This casts a new light on how stoic and inexpressive he always is. It says something about the situation that this is still only the second most concerning outcome.
introduced my mom to pirating websites now she’s watched “so many movies I haven’t seen in years! for free!” and she wants me to “tell your internet followers about this!”
she does want me to warn you “don’t click on those ads with the very pretty ladies!” and that “please tell those lesbians on the internet not to fall for it!”
who are you calling terrifying this is clearly a friend of the highest quality
all yall with ur “uwu smol friend” bullshit gonna let us walk right into the fucking robot apocalypse someone could make a metal gear in real life and youd all say its adorable
this is exactly the kind of shit im talking about when i say i have no patience for people who look at robots and immediately start thinking about terminator shit. why is this terrifying? because it looks like a snake? so the fuck what? the reason robots are made to look like existing organisms is because those organisms have a several million year head start on robotics engineers on solving problems like how to move in water while expending minimal energy or how to walk over uneven terrain while carrying a heavy load.
it’s also really telling that people are much more scared of these organic robots that fall into the uncanny valley than they are of drones, which are robots that currently exist and have been killing people for several years. if a “robot apocalypse” does end up happening, it wont be due to organic-looking robots suddenly achieving sentience and deciding to wipe out all life on earth, it’ll be because some rich asshole or a war-hungry country sees new technology with the potential to kill people and harnesses it for that purpose, which has already happened several times over the course of human history.
tl;dr: stop opposing technological advancements with massive potential for good because you watched Terminator once, also this snake is cute and a friend
