Random-Mess

This blog is a mix of memes, science articles, political science topics, and all sorts of abstract strange shit I like, also some NSFW content may show up. Don't like it, leave. If you do like it follow or not.

[smvrgs]

[hex-girlfriend]

An appropriate response

[11-15-11]

[no-continuum-ever]

She does, I Do

I want her to hate me, but she doesn't.

I want her to think I am unattractive, but she doesn't.

I want her to not be able to love me, but she can.

I need her to not be nice to me, but she is.

I need her to not respect me, but she does.

I need her to stop talking to be, but she won't.

I need to not love her, but I do.

I want to be hers, and I could be, but I am not.

I need this to end, but I really never want it to stop.

[no-continuum-ever]

Sometimes you have to be selfish and not help others. Especially when you yourself need help. It is not out of a place of greed, but necessity to become a better person.

[theslaybymic]

Watch: Kristen Bell opens up about the mental health double standard and how she manages her own struggle.

Follow @this-is-life-actually

[laureninlilly]

Hit reblog on this so hard

[geniusorinsanity]

SHOUT OUT TO KRISTEN BELL’S MOM THOUGH? WHAT KIND OF FANTASTIC SELF-AWARE PARENTING, WELL DONE MA'AM

[no-continuum-ever]

Sevro: I am a confident driver

Darrow: You almost ran over Roque

Sevro: And I am confident I won't miss next time

[eldritchscholar]

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.

[benegesserwitch]

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.

[darkersolstice]

@we-are-threadmage

[systlin]

Someone port Doom to a blanket

[rolypolywardrobe]

I really love tumblr for this 🙌

[isnerdy-deactivated20190101]

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.

[val-mora]

Here is a Jacquard loom:

(Source: Wikimedia commons)

(Image: a picture of a large, antique jacquard loom, with wide punch cards hanging down from the feeder.)

This loom is circa late 1800s, but Jacquard looms were developed in the early 1800s.

[weavemama]

ladies and gentlemen we have officially reached the “in case a nuclear attack happens” phase……. [x]

[trip-usingizi-rp-blog]

This shit is wild.

[goodshinyhunter]

There should be an amber alert or something to warn us, hopefully. But if you’re so close to the blast that the entire outside flashes white your first priority is to get underneath the blastwave any way you can.

After that you have 2 options: drive away or protect yourself from the radiation.

Option one is tough because literally everybody else is going to want to do this, and you could get stuck right in the fallout. And lemme tell you, if you’re stuck out there when the ashes first fall for more than 15 minutes, you’re dead. Radiation poisoning.

Option two is harder, but has a better success rate. Get underground. Most houses have a crawlspace, but in this bad time just saw a fucking hole in your floor. Put table over hole. Pack some large containers (like tubs), with dirt, tight, and stack them on your table or wherever you’re going to be directly underneath. you need 36 inches if dirt to be protected from the radiation poisoning. You could preemptively buy lead and stick that in a container with a lot of serface area, i forget how many inches you need vertically.

How ever much serface area the dirt/metal/lead covers is how much you and your party will be able to move around. As long as there’s enough inches vertically you’ll be good so long as you stay under it.

You gotta stay under there for at least 2 weeks, 3 to be sure.

[galaxy-manticore]

Also, if you can see the mushroom cloud, stick your arm out as far as you can. Do a thumbs-up and close one eye. If your thumb is bigger than the cloud, you are safe. If the cloud is bigger or the same size as your thumb, then that means you are in the radiation zone and should evacuate immediately.

[magic-owl]

I cannot believe I actually have to freaking reblog this but here y'all go just in case

[shit-editor]

Take a break from the humor for just a second and read this.

[thewickedwilds]

Sorry, what year is this again??

[ghostsandgoblins]

[vincent-van-gtg]

[fitnessdesire]

Can’t risk it

[laderdesders1]

The duck of creativity. I waited so long for it.

[writings-and-rambles-blog]

[writings-and-rambles-blog]

[beachdeath]

[emtmercy]

ICONIC

[just-shower-thoughts]

If we don’t accept refugees because 2 out of 100 M&M’s are poisoned then why is it OK the have “a few bad apples” in a police department?

[anras-blog]

[im-awkwardly-here]

we need to talk about shrek more

[rat-cyng]

let’s be honest though, millennial hate is totally a thing rich folks started because they’re pissed that we have really unpredictable consumer habits and it isn’t as easy to get us to buy into stuff, so they’re mad we aren’t just money giving/traditional economy supporting machines like they expected us to be

like look at how much millennial hate articles are things like “millennials aren’t eating cereal and it’s hurting the cereal industry” or “millennials aren’t buying houses and that’s bad” or “millennials #1 utmost priority isn’t trying to make as much money as possible” and rich folks are mad about it, so just posturing our unpredictability/nontraditional values as “laziness” gets everyone else on board the hate train in some weird attempt to collectively subdue us

[jadelyn]

“You are Doing Capitalism Wrong and it scares me” - bitter Boomers to Millennials who are not buying into their shit (or buying their shit)

[teapotsahoy]

Keep in mind that the subprime mortgage crisis was at a pretty pivotal time in Millenial’s lives, and taught them that financial institutions are not on your side, will lie to you, and specifically will lie to you about what you can afford. Like, this isn’t coming from nowhere.

[yolandaash]

I mean boomers refuse to pay a living wage to anyone and then wonder why those people don’t buy anything? I am sorry but what exactly is the disconnect here?

[anightvaleintern-blog1]

Millennials value work that has meaning above work that pays well and they hate that as well.  It means we can’t be shut up with busy work while they’re made to seem like they’re running a well oiled machine.  They come from a generation of a boss being someone who says “do what I say because I told you to” and we come from a generation who values a boss that says “what can I do for you that will help you excel at your job?”

Millennials do not cope well with meaningless busy work so their boss looks better.  They don’t cope with being talked down to or not being assisted by their boss when they have a problem.  They do not deal well with their innovative ideas being shut down because “that’s not how we do it here.” and I don’t see how any of those things is a problem.

Millennials are also the first generation since the internet was a prominent thing to utilize it as a source of information in a way that is empowering for each other.  A single millennial can buy a product and then inform anyone who wants to know about the quality of said product.  It only takes a handful of millennials to say “this is a substandard product” to render all the millions of dollars spent on advertising that product completely useless.

Big business has been a blotch on millennials lives since before most of you could even assume a role in adulthood to effect it, so you trust one another more than you trust advertisements or sponsorship, etc.  

On the flip side, though, you enthusiastically will push and promote things that you love.

Big business and their baby boomer CEOs and presidents HATE this.  Because it means that they can no longer provide a substandard product while making the consumer feel there is nothing better out there.

In the past, if every dish soap was awful, you just had to continue using awful dish soap.  Now, you can crowd source an alternative.  You can post in a forum, your facebook, a mass text, etc and say “I hate every dish soap, what can I do?” and you will be directed to actual good brands or you will be taught how to brew your own.

You’re a great generation, I’m really proud of you guys.

[kyraneko]

Seriously, tho.

I’d love to buy a house, but I can’t afford a down payment and can’t be certain that I’ll have the same income levels for thirty years and I don’t actually know whether the banks will accept my highly-fluctuating, self-employed-and-seasonal-labor income as stable enough or high enough to be approved for a mortgage.

And also every new housing development I’ve seen in the past five years has been “Executive Housing, Starting At 390K” and the realtor websites are full of last decade’s foreclosed subdivision homes in the $275K region, and there’s legit no one, including the zoning board, that’s going to help me find or make a cute little house on a tenth of an acre in the region of $50-60K, let alone every other millennial who might like to settle down in a place that suits her desires and means.

Oh, and that same zoning means five people aren’t allowed to share that $300K, 5-bedroom McMansion, because fuck us, that’s why.

And what else? The refrigerator that recently conked out on me was manufactured in 1967. That thing lasted almost fifty years, and today if I walk into a big box store’s appliance department to buy a new refrigerator they will tell me I should really buy a warranty to cover the apparently-substantial risk that it will break within two to five years.

Oh, and there’s apparently a $400ish premium to buy one with a convenient configuration because if you want the refrigerator on top and accessible without bending down for anyone taller than your average first grader there aren’t any of those in the entry-level price range. Once again, fuck us.

Then there’s the labor market itself, where “entry level” positions want three-to-five years of experience, and everybody won’t shut up about the trades but even that requires a $5K+ outlay to go to school for it, and every fast-food restaurant out there has a permanent “Now Hiring” sign up because they drive employees away as fast as they can replace them.

And so many food-service jobs involve being forced to throw away loads of food as it expires but if you eat it or take it home it’s viewed as stealing, and retail jobs sometimes require you to smash perfectly good computers with a sledgehammer so nobody can use them, and fuck all of this, yes, I’m gonna make my own goddamn laundry detergent from a recipe I found on the internet, and I’m gonna buy as much of my vegetables as possible in seed form, and I’m gonna fucking read the consumer reviews on shit before I buy it and I’m going to source a refrigerator from Cragislist for approximately the price of the warranty on a new one, and if The Market wants me to buy a house, it can bloody well wait for me to have the money.

Because seriously, with its “Ask not what your economy can do for you, ask what you can do for your economy” mindset and historic, far-reaching fuckery, the business side of the equation has little room to complain about millennials being the selfish ones.

[jamongthewildflowers-deactivate]

I reblog this every single time it shows up on my dash

[kileyrae]

This is your daily reminder that a person doesn’t have to speak English to be worthy of your respect. This is your daily reminder that English is a stupid language and can be extremely hard for non-native (& native) speakers to learn and grasp. This is your daily reminder that the U.S. is a multicultural society and we have no official language nor was English the first language spoken here. This is your daily reminder that the world is a big place full of millions of different cultures and it cost you nothing to act like a decent human being and respect your fellow humans. This is your daily reminder not to be a f*cking a**hole.