Ros Hollow @roshollow - Tumblr Blog

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They're both checking me out while I sit in my recliner and Sunny decided they weren't close enough and so they bit Ophie's feet until he moved. 🤨

cute-animals-only

first time seeing a pomelo -

the-vegan-muser

She’s trying to scratch herself, but her method doesn’t seem particularly effective.

black-quadrant

he’s literally chillin w me snvsvnfsv

brooklynbridgebirds

Yellow-rumped Warbler Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 3

I’m actually not super crazy about the idea of being on tumblr again but it’s the only place I can really think of to write long-form journals to keep from irritating the shit out of people on my twitter. Not that I much care at this point, but struggling with agoraphobia and severe depression borne out of loneliness is really difficult. Same with suicidal idealation and just feeling like I don’t really have anyone I can talk to anymore. This weekend, I was so excited to just relax and enjoy my time but it seems like it’s the lowest point I’ve had in a while. Yesterday I feel like I should have enjoyed it but I genuinely just felt cripplingly lonely.

bridsandbirbs

myathecockatiel

“i shat in your hair and you don’t know”

programmerhumour

//TODO

palepastelgoth

Spelling it out. 😇 by meimuxo

mockwa

customer accepted the outcome of the work

raccooncomic

77. SQL

roshollow

I had this exact situation happen and that's the moment I realized I was a data person, lmfao.

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.

dollsahoy

(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)

butts-for-days

Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”

costumersupportdept

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)

deeplylearning

(Context Video: The Effects of a Gender Neutral Education)

The boys with their temper tantrums was a bit disturbing to see because that behavior as children is directly reflected in the violence adult men commit against women (obviously #notallmen…). But I do appreciate the effort to bring up the confidence in these girls.

I remember going through my undergrad studies in physics where I was the only woman in my class. I was one of the top students. Sometimes I’d beat everyone sometimes I wouldn’t. The moment I failed at anything I could see how I was treated especially differently. Or even how women in other years were treated differently.

The guys would gossip about this girl in a different year where they were essentially questioning, “why does she belong here” only for me to find out from other women that that particular girl would get 100 on nearly every assignment. Yet guys who roll with a “Cs get degrees” attitude were rarely gossiped about.

I remember how I wanted to choose a particularly difficult senior research project in order to challenge myself. Given that my advisor was an expert in the subject, it wasn’t an outlandish idea. Until that advisor had to abruptly leave the college before the semester started and I was left with graduate-level work to do with another professor who was, well, not an expert in that field (not his fault at all). It was so much harder to get anything done because my project was so conceptually difficult without that expert help (the math was especially difficult).

I literally had a classmate say to my face things like, “You’re just carrying all those books around with you so you can look smart.” After I had just come from the library. I would get jokes about the content of my project I had discussed in my presentations and when I’d get stumped on how to explain something I was just stupid, right? It’s not that I chose a project to challenge myself which went horribly wrong when my main source of assistance for graduate-level content was now gone, right?

At one point that classmate ended up telling me that he was sorry for what he said because he didn’t think he could do my project at all, so he was projecting onto me because his project was “conceptually simple”. I was glad to hear him admit that, but the problem is the fact that I still had to deal with all of that poor treatment up until then, and that this happens to women in physics (and other male-dominated fields) every single day.

I just want a world where women and minorities don’t have to be 100% perfect at everything just to be considered competent in “hard” fields. Because god damnit the men are never perfect either.