ultralaser

It’s that time of year again…

stop normalizing going to work and start normalizing whatever this is

chef’s kiss emoji

doooooom

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

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).

why are moms so afraid of Doom turning their kids into devil-worshippers. like, Doom has a pretty strong anti-demon message to it

One of the devs of the original 1993 game is a mormon with that exact position.

That would be Sandy Petersen.

“You kill demons to save the World.”

“That’s devil worship.”

“Lady….you cut in half demons with a chainsaw. It’s not worshipping anything but the chainsaws frankly.”

@the-porter-rockwell

Hahad my mom wouldve been anti-doom had i ever played it.

Only message I ever got from Doom was find Demons wherever they are and show them no mercy

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.

This might be the best thing ever filmed.

I’ve seen the gif, but it’s even better with the context of how little time it took.

please watch this show

I plugged 3 consoles into one A/V port for maximum gaming.

Battle for dominance in the game dome

this is one of my favorite quotes from the doom comic why does nobody ever mention this

lmao bye

#aesthetic

but is it running Doom yet

they did!

(source)

of  COURSE

devices running doom that should not logically be able to run doom is still my favorite form of technological shitposting

i'm gonna sing the doom song, kay?

GOOD PARTS OF THE DOOM MOVIE

babyfaced dwayne johnson, karl urban, and rosamund pike

soap

rosamund pike’s nipples

the five minute first person sequence

karl urban and rosamund pike’s awkward sibling relationship, and the fact that the movie drops us into their estrangement and the crisis in medias res

there is a bfg, kind of

BAD PARTS OF THE DOOM MOVIE

the script

the badly lit set which is a tv budget recreation of the third game

the fact that this movie pretty openly has nothing to do with the original games, not in a ‘going in a new direction’ way like resident evil or assassin’s creed - or even the doom 3 game which this is supposedly inspired by - but in a ‘this feels like an unrelated script we changed the name to doom and called it a day’ sense

no hell, no demons, no hell demons, not even the color orange, and set underground on a planet that reportedly wasn’t even originally mars, and certainly isn’t recognizable as such

whatever was going on with the way they wrote the rock, who goes from gruff to serial killer before he turns into a space mutant, in a way that makes no sense at all even given the apparent conceit of 'he is a decorated combat veteran ala dutch in predator, but also dumb as a post and takes his orders exactly literally’

literally every other part of this disaster

MOAR BADNESS I HAD FORGOTTEN

soap is a non-disabled actor playing someone in a space wheelchair

karl urban says 'this place is hell’ and 'don’t let me become one of those demons’ but means it allegorically, not literally

the non-demonic precursor race ancient aliens space mutation varies depending on whether you possess the **warrior gene**, which like assassin’s creed this year runs with the eugenicist idea that violence roots in genetics, and not social factors like systemic poverty, but where assassin’s creed posits a totalitarian regime bent on eliminating the genetic root of violence opposed by heroic serial killers, doom posits a genetic counterpoint whereby the space mutation turns those //with// the warrior gene into monsters, and those //without// into glorious randian supermen

karl urban gets in a fist fight with the rock and wins

the only reason soap is in a space wheelchair (segway legs) is bc having all the monsters be cyborgs would apparently have been too rad

i want to clarify that last point - there is literally no reason for dexter fletcher's character 'pinkie' not to be an actual disabled actor. they don't really let him use his natural charm, instead he's just as annoying, if less openly sexist, than the disposable marines. and he never gets out of the wheelchair, or, rather, takes off his wheeled robot pants, so it's not even like they needed him to be able to actually walk.

when he turns into a monster, one of the robot legged pinkie demons from doom 3 (get it with the clever character name?), we realize that not only were they too clever to actually accept the game's premise **that there are non-human monsters from non-allegorical space hell**, but they were too cool to say, also these guys are cyborgs bc body horror x4 (zombies, demons, borg implants, body modification), so they went to enormous, elaborate lengths to write in a dude who is already a cyborg so that when he later becomes a cyborg monster, it **makes sense**.

and they cast a guy who can walk as a guy who can't, to sweeten the deal.

this is, actually, emblematic of every decision made in the entire production of this film. taking the source material, a //video game//, at face value would be too embarassing, so they took an implicitly cool premise - fighting hell demons on mars - and removed everything unique about it and turned it into a generic nothing.

and now, even though the balance of his career is good, whenever the rock stands up and says 'fast eight is gonna be amazing' or 'i'm so proud to be a part of moana, it's really special', there's that voice in the back of my head going 'but he said the same things abt //doom//'.