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Originally posted by thewonderwheel

Did you know? You can buy wild rice direct from Native folks!

glitterjellyfemme:

a-spoon-is-born:

Wild rice isn’t actually rice-it’s a grass seed that grows naturally in lakes in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and it’s been an indigenous staple food for many, many centuries. Although some corporations have taken and grown “wild rice” in paddies, it is not the same thing- it is actually a hybrid seed that is not the same quality and often sold for a higher price anyways.

Not only is the wild rice a sacred food, but is a form of Indigenous science that lets you know how healthy the water is (or isn’t), because water is life and affects the health of all people, plants, and animals that live with it. This has been belatedly acknowledged by very recent research from the University of Minnesota that the health of the wild rice can predict all health of lakes and streams.

I buy my wild rice from the Red Lake Nation and the White Earth Nation.

The cool thing about buying from the White Earth Nation is that they also have videos showing the traditional processes involved in harvesting and parching the rice, and they offer stuff like gift baskets, chokecherry preserves, maple candy, soup & pancake mix, and cookbooks which make great gifts!

What I like about buying from the Red Lake Nation is there is a massive variety and quantity of different wild rice products at many different prices! They are aware that the broken grains are not as quality, but it doesn’t go to waste-you can buy the broken grains for “Soup Bits” ($3.49) which are an inexpensive way to add flavor & nutrition to soups and stews. They also offer “Quick Cook” wild rice ($5.69), which is prepared from a lighter roast/parch process that allows the grains to cook in a shorter amount of time and has a rich, traditional flavor.

You can also buy syrups and jellies made from hand harvested hawthorn, chokecherry, and highbush cranberry there.

BUT! If you’re worried about shipping costs or like me, are disabled/have limited mobility and can’t always get to the store like you might prefer,Red Lake Nation also sells their rice through Amazon, eligible for Prime shipping. This is also good for those, Native or not, who are struggling in the community and share their wishlists for help purchasing food.(Also please know this post is only meant to share information, not to make anyone feel bad or imply they’re eating “inferior” food.)

If you’re interested in finding out what other nations cultivate and sell/trade wild rice, there’s a partial list here of where you can buy hand-harvested wild rice from native people in the Great Lakes region

I’ll buy a bag and see how it goes.

(via poonaneetsunamee)

realtrashwitch:

lilybeth666:

cassieofherne:

sauvamente:

ourblackisgold:

sauvamente:

thinkmillionsmakemillions:

robregal:

freeandformed:

freeandformed:

if you’re reading this

a lump sum of money is on the way to you

• it happened today, damn that was like 3 days maybe?

It Works the money is on its way!

Need this.

Of course

It worked tho

I just won $500 off a scratch Ticket lottery.

ENERGY

OKAY LEGIT I REBLOGGED THIS YESTERDAY. ME AND MY PARTNER ARE IN SUCH A TIGHT SPOT FOR MONEY ATM AS WE ARE SAVING FOR A DEPOSIT ON A HOUSE. I GOT PAID DOUBLE WHAT I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO GET AND SO DID HE AND HONESTLY I CRIED SO MUCH TODAY IM SO HAPPY AND RELIEVED

Positive vibes!!!!!

Originally posted by plus-de-dimanche

Originally posted by zirvedecamasirasangenc

(via xtremecaffeine-deactivated20181)

seatrench:

happy pride fish belong to the gays

isnerdy:

rolypolywardrobe:

systlin:

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

Someone port Doom to a blanket

I really love tumblr for this 🙌

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.

(via lord-kitschener)