darqueloaf:

electric-eff:

lakritzwolf:

transcoranic:

jumpingjacktrash:

ceruleancynic:

camwyn:

nemhaine42:

i’m starting to hate the frequency of pinterest as a google result more than i hate pinterest itself. listen, google, googly-mate, pinterest isn’t a fuckign source. I want the sites those pictures came from because those are the ones with information such as dates, which is the entire point of the thing I am googling.   

Damn right. How the hell am I supposed to find tutorials on how to do wire work or bead weaving when the first howevermany pages of Google results are some idiot’s cluster of Pinterest collections of those tutorials?

SOMEONE ELSE HATES PINTEREST AS MUCH AS I DO

not only does it fuck with sourcing images, but you can’t even SEE the images unless you have a ~pinterest account~ which I have zero interest in acquiring; it does this so completely adorable coy little thing where it shows you half the page and then when you scroll down it goes *complicated tiresome flower emoji face* JOIN PINTEREST 2 SEE MORE! *complicated tiresome flower emoji face* and my systolic reading spikes. 

and google lists individual pinterest pages as separate results, so if a picture is popular, there can be HUNDREDS of pinterest listings before you find anything you could possibly trace back to a source.

listen, all my art bros who are mad about people not sourcing art, i dig that, i agree that sourcing is important, but maybe stop saying reverse image search is easy or ‘30 seconds’ or whatever. sometimes it’s just straight up impossible because fucking pinterest ruins everything.

SUPER EASY WAY TO AVOID PINTEREST: type your query and then -pinterest

7 of the first 12 results are from pinterest

zero items from pinterest not a single one I’m free

Reblog to save a set of nerves.

YES THANK YOU fuck pinterest

You can also use Google advanced search 😀

https://www.google.com/advanced_search

allthingslinguistic:

linguisten:

max-vandenburg:

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.

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.

And don’t forget The Wartime Spies Who Used Knitting as an Espionage Tool

Weaving is also binary! At any given point either the warp goes over the weft or the weft goes over the warp, and the Jacquard loom was an important development in both the history of textiles and the history of computing. From Wikipedia:  

The Jacquard head used replaceable punched cards to control a sequence of operations. It is considered an important step in the history of computing hardware.^[14] The ability to change the pattern of the loom’s weave by simply changing cards was an important conceptual precursor to the development of computer programming and data entry. Charles Babbage knew of Jacquard looms and planned to use cards to store programs in his Analytical engine.

problemsleuth:

[1920′s gangster voice] every single one’a you’s…… every single one’a you’s is valid…….