Need to take a nap? Use this guide to help you decide how long you should rest! Just be sure to avoid the “bad nap”!

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).

‘moonwalk’

How the media depicts the Apollo 11 mission:

Actual quotes from the Apollo 11 mission:

Welcome to the space age, ladies and gentlemen

This is really quite a big deal. A tremendous amount of modern research ends up being sold to journals which require unreasonable payments to access it and only pay the original authors a pittance. It’s nice to see an agency like NASA deliberately widebanding its findings.

Not sure if people fully realize just how big of a deal this is. THIS is how science is advanced. Not through biased corporate research, business secrets, marketing, paywalls and patent wars. But through open, uncensored and unrestricted public access to knowledge.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=%22nasa+funded%22[Filter]

^ There’s the direct link to all the studies.

NASA IS GOOD, NASA IS GREAT

@osunism

NASA is the hero we don’t deserve.

This deserves every reblog.

@geh-is-okeh

In the face of institutions being silenced, this is doubly huge.

NASA has released new images of Jupiter, taken by the Juno Spacecraft.

WOW

Space shuttles Endeavour, left, and Atlantis are parked nose-to-nose for a brief photo opportunity.

fight fight fight fight

At some point in our species’ future, a human will walk up to the Opportunity rover, clear the dust off of her solar array, and wake her up.

This probably won’t happen in my lifetime, but it will happen, and when it does, it will be incredible.

we will remake our own fairy tales in science

for the princess awakes from her great slumber… with a kiss

this morning NASA abandoned their mars rover Opportunity (aka Oppy) because it (she) got hit by a storm on Mars and it knocked her camera and wheels out and her last words to the team were “my battery is low and it is getting cold”. I know she’s a machine but I’m devastated. Oppy is the one who discovered water on Mars. RIP oppy ily space baby

they didn’t abandon her!! they tried eight months to reach her!!!! as their last farewell to her yesterday they played her “I’ll be seeing you” by Billie Holiday:

“I’ll find you in the morning sun

And when the night is new

I’ll be looking at the moon

But I’ll be seeing you”

They love her so much and they tried so hard!!!

Oh man, It doesn’t end there.

This isn’t the first song NASA sent Opportunity. They had a playlist:

https://www.space.com/41434-mars-rover-opportunity-wakeup-music-playlist.html?fbclid=IwAR3uL6q4tOmLQTIEhiwYegGc99nv4N01HQKItpCLQiQYIptBOevNN6uIyT8

It’s on Spotify, it’s called “Opportunity, wake up!“

This is what’s great about NASA and it’s what’s great about people. These are world-class engineers. When they sent a rover to another planet they could have easily looked at it as just another scientific tool. But people don’t do that. We can and will get emotionally attached to the most inanimate of objects. We can and will anthropomorphize anything. And frankly Opportunity’s camera mast looks like a little face with eyes and everything, so why not?

So they started calling it her.

They nicknamed her Oppy.

They told her to take a selfie not long ago.

After 15 years of Oppy flipping the double bird to her original 90 day life expectancy, when a planet-spanning dust storm finally knocked her out and she stopped responding to the engineer’s wake-up messages, they started playing music for her.

And after 8 months and almost 1000 unanswered wake-up messages, when it was finally clear that Oppy was never going to wake up, the last thing these world-class NASA engineers did for their little rover on another planet

Was play her a love song

At some point in our species’ future, a human will walk up to the Opportunity rover, clear the dust off of her solar array, and wake her up.

This probably won’t happen in my lifetime, but it will happen, and when it does, it will be incredible.

thank you, opportunity 

“my battery is low and it’s getting dark” is so hauntingly human, so crushingly lonely. I can’t articulate the deep, profound ache that sentence evokes. It’s acceptance and defeat and terror and sadness all at once, all from one tiny machine we asked to explore the stars for us.

see you space cowboy

ME RN:

jupiter’s south pole / van gogh’s starry night. #jupiter #juno #vangogh #cosmos #starrynight