Daily OpusEverything I write is freely rebloggable. Just keep the source and tell people about my books :D [Until I decide otherwise, my pronouns are Ze/Hir/Hirself. As in "Ze went to the shops to get hir medication hirself". Thank you for the respect.]
Challenge #02987-H064: Unwelcome Advancements
[H] “Hold still, we’re going to try this again.”
[galactic volunteer] “It won’t knock me out like last time?”
[H] “Nope, bugs are worked out, we tested on other humans first for a reason after all, that knock-out was accidental, sorry about that.”
[galactic volunteer] “Alright, I’m ready.”
The human throws the small metal disk which adheres to the galactic and, suddenly, they can’t move. They can breathe, see, hear, they are not being hurt, but they can’t, otherwise, move.
[galactic] “Well… it works, take it off now please.”
[human] “Thank you very much for your help, I’m grateful.” They remove the disk and transfer time to their volunteer’s account before heading straight to medical
[galactic] “Why did you make that?”
[Human] “The more we go after bad guys, the more people end up dying in the fight. The more we can stop bad guys without killing, the happier I’ll be.” – DaniAndShali
All high-octane policing has one significant problem - collateral damage. Even with stunner fire, a miss can create problems. Worse, many stunners need calibration to be sure that the target species is safely knocked out, without harming any others. Since many offenders are Deathworlders, this means that any Havenworlders caught in the crossfire could die. They needed a better way that wasn’t controlled exclusively by a keen eye and a steady hand.
Which was the key to the body lock disk. A specific charge, some micro-scanners, and a very specific program involving species specific neurology and nanomachines to seek out and disrupt certain key areas. Upon contact, the disk released a series of seeker drones that spun nano-wires into the prospective victim’s nervous system. It would scan the one struck, and render them immobile without also ceasing autonomic functions.
Those struck by it would be stopped, without it being terminal. From Havenworlder to Deathworlder, any fleeing miscreant would not be able to escape justice. Of course, they tested it from Deathworlder to Havenworlder, in that specific order, with Mediks on standby in case anything went wrong. It didn’t.
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.
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.
(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)
Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”
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)
This is fascinating. I knew there was a correlation between binary and weaving but this just takes it to a whole nother level.
I’m 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.
I’ve seen this cross my dash a few times, but I’ve never watched the video before. Maybe I just didn’t pay attention when I was a kid, but I don’t remember ever seeing just how the Jacquard loom works. I just knew that the punch cards controlled which threads were raised. It’s cool to see the how, not just the what.
When the Sky People left, they left behind the Thing. It was flat, and it could bend, and it would not break. It was not food, and it was not a tool, but the Sky People had touched it a lot, so it had to be important.
Thorn poked at it the way she had seen the Sky people do. The figures that came up meant little to her, but the shaking and the red was danger. On the fifth try, she got the pattern that changed the Thing. So many colours. So many different ways the Thing could show her… things.
One of them spoke to her. Words that didn’t have meaning, but Thorn was young. Thorn learned. She learned Thing words like “edible” and what “cook” was. And how to make “fire” like the Sky People did. The Thing was useful. Once she could understand it. And one of the first things she understood was that the Thing liked to eat sunshine, but it wasn’t a plant. She kept it in daylight so that the LoBatt Warning would never show.
“The universe is change; life is your perception of it.” — Marcus Aurelius – @recklessprudence
What alarmed Rael the most about Ambassador Shayde was how quickly she adapted to the latest in technology. Only B'Nari tech confounded her, but then, it confounded everyone but the B'Nari, who were made to merge with it. Shayde had the annoying habit of treating anything knew as if it should have existed some years prior to its actual invention.
When given something from her own past, it took her a moment or two to remember how it actually worked. The Archivaas called it the Reverse Connecticut Yankee Effect, and many of them were working on papers about it that only other Archivaas would bother to read.
So far, she had attempted to touch the screen of an early generation iPod, nearly set a turntable stylus on a DVD, and tried to speak to one of the Macintosh personal computers via its mouse. But that last one may have been a joke that only she understood.
Stranded alien offers gender re-assignment technology in return for fuel and food. Afterwards people can father or bear a child. What happens next? – @knitnan
Communicating had been the first hurdle. Bella had managed most of it with pantomime and imitation. The second hurdle was that Earth technology was centuries behind what this stranded entity had on hand. Most of their months together were spent building the tools to build the things that Yrxnahb needed to repair their vessel.
Bella tried to take notes, but most of it was beyond her comprehension. Yrxnahb didn’t try to teach her, either. There were laws against leaving potentially dangerous technology in the hands of warlike primitives. No offense meant. Bella didn’t take any offense at all and threw what there was of her notes into a fire while Yrxnahb watched.
“I get it,” she said, “my species is just not ready for this stuff. We’d just go out and kill everything and think it’s our manifest destiny or whatever.” Bella had read enough of human history for Yrxnahb. They understood too well that humanity were a warlike race with too much hate, yet, to interact peacefully with other stellar cultures.
Imagine the real results of Star Trek’s Transporter technology. – Anon Guest
It was for cargo, initially. And of course there were a subset of the populace who preferred things transported the old-fashioned way. Some who claimed to taste the difference. But by and large, many people didn’t care. You could beam produce straight from the farm to the store, with very little in the way of processing in-between.
People noticed when their food was fresher and lasted longer. People also noticed that bugs came along for the ride. Some even made it through alive. Some made it through inside the produce. Of course, someone had to fix that little flaw.
And it wasn’t long after that that someone started transporting livestock. No more travel sickness. No more cargo holds riddled with disease.
Two years have now passed since Nissan first promised it would deliver a commercially viable self-driving car by 2020, a pledge that seemed bold verging on dangerous at the time. Today, Nissan showed what kind of car might carry such a system five years from now, and if anything, the future looks like it might come even sooner than expected.
Dubbed the Nissan IDS, the concept combines radically sharp bodywork with an electric drivetrain powered by a 60-kWh battery—good enough for roughly 200 miles, much like the upcoming Tesla Model III and the Chevrolet Bolt. To offset the weight of the batteries, the body was made from carbon fiber, and while the shape has too many blades and pivots for everyday use, it’s not that far removed from what a radically redesigned Leaf might resemble.
It’s inside where the IDS offers the break with automotive history that may come from self-driving cars. In driving mode, the steering wheel sits in its traditional place, but when placed into “piloted driving,” the wheel folds away and a set of screens emerge to entertain the passengers. Nissan has even given the driving assistant something of a personality; the car will mimc the driver’s style, and has another forward-facing display that can flash messages to pedestrians.
Nissan chief executive Carlos Ghosn said the automaker was well on track with its tech goals, with plans to offer what it calls Piloted Driving 1.0 on models in Japan next year. That system can change lanes and drive in light congestion, but needs fairly constant human attention. Piloted Driving 2.0, the type suggested by the IDS, will arrive on schedule around 2020—assuming such systems are legal. We’ll have more this week on Nissan’s plans, but at this point, the hurdles to cars that drive themselves look to be as much about people as technology.
I can’t wait to leave a message on that front facing display that reads “fuck off dirtbag”
![Challenge #02987-H064: Unwelcome Advancements “ [H] “Hold still, we’re going to try this again.”
[galactic volunteer] “It won’t knock me out like last time?”
[H] “Nope, bugs are worked out, we tested on other humans first for a reason after all, that...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/e7f51bd68e0a142b18970d7b95a4eb8a/8a3fa0671e2d347a-b2/s500x750/95ea1f97071cb2efceb3722e2e9f5c4e51620aa6.jpg)
