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@corydoncafe
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 purlsâŚ
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 beingâŚ
3322 square feet
Factoring it outâŚ302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.
Hi fun fact!!
The idea of a âbinary codeâ 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:
Hereâs Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, youâll 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.Â
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.Â
Hereâs 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 hereâs a nice little diagram explaining how it works:
But what if you donât 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!
Hereâs 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 0â˛s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1â˛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 đ
It goes beyond this. Â Every computer out there has memory. Â The kind of memory you might call RAM. Â The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory. Â It looked like this:
Wires going through magnets. Â This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily. Â Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1. Â Hereâs a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASAâs Apollo guidance computers:
You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and thatâs because it is. Â But these are also extreme close-ups. Â Hereâs 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. Â Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.
And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon. Â This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive. Â 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 âlittle old lady memory.â
I mean letâs 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 âweaver yelling at Draw Boyâ technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles âraise these and these, lower these!â and hope that he got it right.Â
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.Â
ALSO, itâs not just âlittle old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,â itâs âthe women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.â Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon.Â
And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldnât 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 youâre within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, youâre usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC.Â
The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, Iâve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They donât 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.Â
Iâm 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.
Iâve seen this cross my dash a few times, but Iâve never watched the video before. Maybe I just didnât pay attention when I was a kid, but I donât remember ever seeing just how the Jacquard loom works. I just knew that the punch cards controlled which threads were raised. Itâs cool to see the how, not just the what.
Donât 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).
Red Things,
Green Things,
Blue Things,
BLACK!
Trying to keep busy in my home office during a long un-productive Zoom meeting.
Art by moon_mxtr
One of those rare Nana Mouskouri albums where she sheds her signature black-framed glasses. She is around 42 years of age here. Over the years she has produced over 200 albums in over 12 different languages.
Draw an iceberg and see how it will float > here
Houses in Queen Anne, Seattle.
Am I right?
Art club theme âstoicâ. Cheers!
Just tooling around with moving gifs, cheers.
Todayâs art club theme is âdeliciousâ.Â
Yep! I think Iâve got it! Close enough, and I am pretty happy with the results, cheers!
Oh, yeah, getting closer! :)Â Will have to clean up the image a bunch.
Maybe a bit closer, lots of stuff to fix though on this gif. :(Â Â Â
Not quite the effect I was hoping for....
Tutorial and or tips in color studies?
Hi there! Sorry to keep you waiting on this ask!
I do have another post about landscape painting which overlaps slightly with this. But here Iâll talk specifically about the observational color studies I like to do. Other artists might have different ways of approaching them (and I still have a lot to learn myself), but these are some of the ideas Iâve found useful.
1. Donât seek perfectionObservational color studies are just that â studies. Sketches. Note-taking to reference later. Theyâre not supposed to be complete paintings, so you shouldnât feel pressured to make them âperfectâ. I like posting them sometimes (and hopefully you like seeing them) but there are TONS of messy, scribbly studies I havenât posted anywhere. Theyâre primarily a tool to help me learn, and if messy studies help me learn, so be it!
2. Simplify your shapesSo how do you avoid getting overwhelmed and lost in the details? Focus on the BIG IDEA. Decide what is most important to include in the study and leave out everything else. Start with big shapes, and add details at the very end, if you have time. Personally, Iâm often interested in the sky and the color clouds become when light passes through. So I might make the study about the clouds and ignore buildings/details on the ground. or Iâll add only a very simple ground plane. Other times, Iâll rearrange a composition to include all the important information (like making an object bigger or smaller, or bringing two objects closer together).
3. Step by stepIt helps to find a good workflow, especially when you have to quickly prioritize what information to include. This is relevant especially when youâre painting something like a sunset, when the light changes RAPIDLY and youâll have only 3, 4, 5 minutes to put your colors down. For me, this usually means I build my study from background to foreground: sky, clouds, ground plane, background shapes, foreground shapes. Since I work on iPad Pro, I also keep those parts separated out into layers. In the case of those quick sunset studies, I also observe the parts I havenât painted yet in case the lighting changes enough that Iâll need to work from memory.
4. Some fundamentals to keep in mind:
Value structure: Even though these are color studies, value plays a major role in the colors youâre observing. Pay attention to the difference in value between subjects. Sometimes this can solve color-related problems when your study seems âoffâ somehow. (For example, maybe that sky isnât as light as you think it is? A darker value might mean painting a more vibrant color.)
Lighting setup: Identify the different light sources in the environment. Is it cloudy and overcast? Sunny? Are you indoors, with multiple different light sources? A little study about lighting theory can really help you know what colors to look for in different lighting conditions. For example, in overcast light, youâll see more of the objectsâ local color, while in bright sunlight youâll see a strong direct light (the sun), blue diffused light on shadows and top-facing planes (from the blue sky), and a warm bounce light (from sunlight reflecting off the ground). Will forever recommend James Gurneyâs book âColor and Lightâ for help learning this.
Materials: Different materials reflect light sources in different ways. Being aware of how light passes through or reflects off different materials can help you understand the colors youâre seeing.
5. Going beyondAs you become more comfortable making observational studies, the more you might wish to push them even further by not just copying from life but communicating a feeling. A few ways you might accomplish this:
Exaggerate your colors. Suppose you see a hint of color you wouldnât normally expect to find, such as notes of purpose or red near the horizon of an otherwise blue sky. Try making it brighter/bolder than you really see it. Bump up the saturation, maybe. This is a delicate balance, as you donât want to exaggerate to the point where the colors become garish. But putting emphasis in certain places can remind yourself, or show whoeverâs looking at your study, that you found certain details interesting.
Think about mood. A color script from an animated film follows the emotional beats of the story. As youâre making your studies, consider: how does this moment feel to me? Take a cloudy scene, for instance. Is it cold and miserable? Windy, full of movement and energy? Calm? Dark and ominous? A moment of anticipation or hope with the clouds about the break apart? Each of those conveys a completely different mood. So you might decide upon one and push your color palette to support that idea.
Donât just copy: communicate. This last one is a bit of an abstract idea I need an example to explain:
This sunset study here gave me difficulty because it involved not just color but the properties of light. The sun didnât actually appear white to me - it appeared a bright red/pink color, glowing brighter than the sky around it. But that wasnât something I could reproduce, because if I only painted the color, it wouldnât appear glowing and would blend into the rest of the sky. Instead, I had to think critically: how do I communicate the brightness of this sun? In the end, I opted to make the sun white, with the color I actually observed the sun to be surrounding it.
On my Instagram, Iâve posted a lot of process videos to accompany my studies, if that interests anyone! Theyâre always second image on the studiesâ posts.
I hope you find these thoughts helpful!Â
Skull, todayâs Art Club theme.