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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2nrKy4P:
darkersolstice:
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.
@we-are-threadmage
Ah, this goes back farther than machine knitting– punchcard jacquard weaving looms were invented in 1804, based on a concept originated in 1725 of using punched paper.
This is where computer programming originated, from a practical standpoint.
I got to see one in operation at the Toronto science museum a few years back! It was huge and amazing and had little weights in plastic film canisters that somebody had clearly recently added.
Similarly, machine embroidery– I just got a book on digitizing patterns for embroidery, since I got a little embroidery machine, and the pre-computer method involved, you guessed it– punched paper.
The concept of binary yes/no represented by holes is pretty venerable!
It makes me think about the peasants during the French Revolution who knitted encoded scarfs to record the nobles being guillotined. I’ve never seen a good reference on what that looked like, but I’m sure they used colors to encode, rather than binary patterns. (And there was a myth that Aran Islanders had unique sweaters that could identify them– it’s based off a play where a woman identifies a drowned corpse by the dropped stitch in the stocking, recognizing a knitting error she herself had made to verify that the corpse was her husband. But the myth persists. I’m sorry I can’t recall the name of the play but it’s probably easy enough to find.)
(Your picture was not posted)
darkersolstice:
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.
@we-are-threadmage
Ah, this goes back farther than machine knitting– punchcard jacquard weaving looms were invented in 1804, based on a concept originated in 1725 of using punched paper.
This is where computer programming originated, from a practical standpoint.
I got to see one in operation at the Toronto science museum a few years back! It was huge and amazing and had little weights in plastic film canisters that somebody had clearly recently added.
Similarly, machine embroidery– I just got a book on digitizing patterns for embroidery, since I got a little embroidery machine, and the pre-computer method involved, you guessed it– punched paper.
The concept of binary yes/no represented by holes is pretty venerable!
It makes me think about the peasants during the French Revolution who knitted encoded scarfs to record the nobles being guillotined. I’ve never seen a good reference on what that looked like, but I’m sure they used colors to encode, rather than binary patterns. (And there was a myth that Aran Islanders had unique sweaters that could identify them– it’s based off a play where a woman identifies a drowned corpse by the dropped stitch in the stocking, recognizing a knitting error she herself had made to verify that the corpse was her husband. But the myth persists. I’m sorry I can’t recall the name of the play but it’s probably easy enough to find.)
(Your picture was not posted)
