I Should Be Writing

1 - If Leta was the last Lestrange how can Bellatrix marry one 50 years later?

2 - Are we really not going to ADDRESS Newt DISARMING Grindelwald in the first film therefore changing Elder Wand’s allegiance?

3 - How is Mcgonagall in Hogwarts wasn’t she born in 1935?

4 - WHERE IS GALATEA MERRYTHOUGHT you know the actual defence against the dark arts teacher? because Dumbledore taught Transfiguration?

Me:

selfishness is putting the wants of yourself over the needs of others. 

self respect is putting the needs of yourself over the wants of others.

one is disregarding others, one is taking care of yourself. 

the difference between the two is the difference between being a friend and a doormat. 

taking care of yourself does not make you a bad person

i repeat:

This is not my story.  This was told to me by a woman I knew from work several years ago; she’s a very sweet nurse.

Nurse graduated from nursing school and decided with her friend to move to one of the cities that was listed as having “the most eligible bachelors” from some publication. She moves and starts dating her future husband.

Future Husband’s mother is a viper and decides Nurse is not good enough for her family.  The  happy couple eventually get engaged and future mother-in-law is having none of it.   Tries for several months to break them up; tries to convince Nurse to go back where she came from and simultaneously tries to gently convince her precious son that Nurse may not be good for him.

To add some more context to this situation, this MIL is pretty nasty to Nurse but hides it well to other people, always making sure she’s super (fake) sweet to everyone when others are around.

Finally wedding plans are set so MIL gets desperate.  She gets Nurse alone with a “generous” offer: leave fiance and never come back in exchange for $10,000 (note: this was almost 30 years ago so I guess it was kind of a shitload of money for most).

Nurse is so sick of this woman’s shit and is incredibly insulted. However, she’s intelligent and maintains her composure.  Nurse accepts the offer.

Nurse takes the money, does not leave, and gets married anyway. Nobody else knows about this.

MIL cannot say or do anything about it without exposing herself to her family as a horrible person.

Nurse and husband are still happily married; their kids are grown; husband still has no idea this went down.

Heavily embarrassed they admitted that it was. The reason for the godawful tortured sound the dog had made?

“We took his running harness off.”

She is dumb as soup.

(You didn’t hear that from me: her owner thinks she’s a genius, bless him.)

Anyway, my dog Tribble thinks Arya the husky is one of her very own adopted babies, so she stays with us fairly often. Reasons I have heard this dog dissolve into a screaming, wailing meltdown include:

I followed my buddy up a mildly steep hill and now she’s gone and I can’t figure out how to get down

That one cat won’t be friends with me even though all the others will

I hopped up on the sofa and the hardwood floor next to it is much more confusing than the laminate I have lived on since I was two months old and I don’t know how to get down

I’m mildly bored and my buddy yelled at me when I tried to bite her neck for the zillionth time

I want to play with that potted plant but you said I couldn’t

I’m overcome with joy because you took me on a walk to the hardware store

I want that biscuit but I forgot what sit means and now I’m frustrated

I haven’t seen you in two weeks and I forgot you weren’t dead and I’m overjoyed

You are not petting me enough

You are not petting me at all

I got lost four times in five minutes on the off leash trail and now you won’t let me off again for a while

There’s a brush and I need it

You made eye contact with me and didn’t immediately drop everything to pet me

I kind of suspect this is going on here in part because of the dog being so very specifically upset that the one cat won’t be friends, despite all the other cats being friends, and also the overcome-with-joy bits: you’ll notice they’re very similar to what makes toddlers randomly cry for no reason. 

Where a bulldog doesn’t care about the difference between laminate and hardwood, a husky is just smart enough to get VERY CONCERNED ABOUT HOW THESE ARE SUBTLY DIFFERENT AND POSSIBLY IT MEANS THAT GETTING DOWN WILL BE A TOTALLY DIFFERENT EXPERIENCE AAAAAUGH! and get hysterically anxious about it. 

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

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.

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.

i wish somebody looked at me like the way he looked at that onion