Weaving Tapestries of Code
Jen Luker
PARISS: All right. So, before we welcome our next speaker on stage, I want to give you
a few mind blowing fun facts about her. So, she owns three spinning wheels. She thought
the movie Hackers was about her. Why, you may ask? Before modems and AOL, she used to
hack into the telnet system at the University of Utah so she could message a college student
in Sydney, Australia, that she befriended through exploring the system. After the university
figured out that changing the password wasn't going to stop her from hacking it, they give
her her own log in, which was pretty boss. All right. So, weaving tapestries of code,
let's welcome Jen Luker. [ Applause ]
JEN: Hey, everyone so this is getting to the end of the last day. How has your conference
been? Nice? Awesome. Okay. So, weaving tapestries of code. Now, this is gonna be a fun little
history lesson. Going on a bit of an adventure. Before we get started, some of you are probably
asking, you know, textiles? Why textiles of all the industries in all the world, why textiles?
I want to set up a little bit of a history lesson before we get to the history lesson.
When we are looking at textiles. I want to explain that it takes time to develop the
clothes that we all wear. Back in the mid 17th century, it actually cost about ten days’
worth of work, worth of pay, to pay for a single shirt. So, if you were to take that
money and translate it to what we do today, there are some calculations that essentially
say that this shirt would cost us between 3 and $5,000. So, we need a few updates that
actually did progress things quite a lot. We came up with the spinning wheel. Which
like one tenth of the time that it took to spin yarn, which was one of the largest chunks.
It dropped the time from 2300 hours to spin the yarn for this shirt down to about 400
hours. The other portion was weaving this. Because you're weaving ultra fine threads
in order to make something durable enough to survive. Most people only bought an outfit
a year, maybe two. That's it. So, when we're trying to consider the fact that that's how
expensive this shirt was... let's look at these. So, mid 18th century. This was the
height of fashion in France. This is a ridiculous amount of fabric in that even shows you some
of the undergarments not all but some of the undergarments that the women wore.
These are highly textured, patterned, beautiful pieces of work. Looking at this, this is the
most basic thing. 3 $5,000. This is unreal as far as how much this cost. So, if you look
at how much time it took to develop 18th century French silk brocade, this would take between
15 and 27 days of 12 hours a day of weaving. Because a weaver could only do about 2 inches
per day. These patterns were highly complex. It took two weavers. You had one person that
actually wove the thread and then you had the other person who stood on top of the spinning
or the loom itself and actually picked up the threads individually. So, this was absolutely
a bare minimum of a two person job. Taking 15 27 days. Just to make the fabric for the
outside garment. So, then we get to this picture which is one of the most famous early computing
pictures ever. This hung on the wall of Charles Babbage amongst others at the time. There
were not that many made. They were commissioned. But they were highly incredible. Charles Babbage
used to have these really big parties. And he'd invite all of the great names of the
day. Including the Duke of Wellington who was known to be extremely, extremely smart.
And Charles Babbage kind of leaned on him and would look at him and say, so, how do
you think this picture was made? And the Duke of Wellington would look at this and he would
say, well, it looks a lot like a wood cut. And if you look at this wood cut, it actually
does look a fair amount like that wood cut. Except when you look deeper, it looks more
like your suit jacket than it does a wood cut. And that's because everything from the
words on the bottom to the image itself to the background is all woven using a Jacquard
loom. This took 24,000 cards to program. When the average French silk brocade took about
4,000. It would take months to lay this out. We got the French Jacquard loom starting in
December of 1800 was when the patent was given. It was put into production in about 1801.
And it's a little bit misleading because it's not just the loom that we're talking about.
It's basically that top box was the real innovation. But there's really nothing on this loom that
was unique to Jacquard. In 1725, Bouchon had developed his loom that used a piece of paper
that had punched holes in it to essentially line up and set the process versus the drawlooms
in the day with warp threads that allowed him to pick them up programmatically using
rods. And in 1728, three years later, his protege, Falcon, developed this one. Those
pieces of paper are really difficult, because if one rips and they ripped all the time
if you misplaced is ever so slightly, it would tear. You would have to re create the entire
piece of paper. By dividing them in two cards and having the large holes on the side so
you can mount them in the places they need to be. The positioning was much more accurate.
Much less likely to tear and if one did tear, you could just replace one and sew it back
together. So, this was much more user friendly. However, this still required two people because
you still needed someone to lift up the cords. So, then we have the flying shuttle developed.
And I don't necessarily mean this shuttle. However, I do mean this shuttle. The reason
I had the previous image is because this is how it works. It shot the flying shuttle across
a room at 60 miles an hour. Preventing a user from having to lift up each thread and moving
it back and forth. By being able to have those things lifted, it did it for you. 20 years
later, almost, we have Vaucanson's loom. His loom was the first automatic loom. Vaucanson
was actually an automaton, he made the tambourine player and this is the digesting duck. This
is where we get, if it walks like a duck, if it talks like a duck. In fact, some people
jokingly name this the defecating duck. Because this duck would poop. So, if none of these
ideas are truly unique to Jacquard, why did he get all the credit? The answer to that
is that he brought all of these pieces to the. From Bouchon's system to lifting threads,
Falcon's card in a loop, Kay's flying shuttle and the control system for switching cards,
that was the first time it was put together in one piece. It was maybe not the first automated
one, but it was the very first user friendly automated machine. Now, unfortunately, right
about this time, just shy of when this was developed, we had the French Revolution. And
more specifically, we had the reign of terror. It took 10 months to kill off one fifth of
the French population. 400,000 people died. Now, though that hit most of the demographics
in France, it was towards the clergy and the aristocracy. Which means that by the time
the Jacquard loom came out, nobody wanted French silk brocade. So, what happened to
our Jacquard loom? Richard Roberts, who developed every single one of the things on this list,
a wet gas meter, improved lathe, planing machine, power loom, self acting spinning mule, we
could go from four threads what we could do then up to 80 threads per machine. Dropping
what used to be 400 hours’ worth of work into 9 minutes. The gear cutting machine,
the electro magnet and the punching machine. He took Jacquard's loom, specifically the
head, and attached it to something that we now know as a riveter. And because of Richard
Roberts, we not only have the first automatic powered loom that no longer needs people to
sit there and weave. We also have industrial, military ships. And bridges. And that's where
it went. All right. So, it only took a few years, really, to get to a great majority
of the innovation. It took another 50 years for that to really come into play. But once
it did, it very quickly jumped from an automated loom into a powered loom. So, back to Charles
Babbage. One of the reasons why he was so amazed by the Jacquard loom was because he
loved the punch cards. He wanted to develop his machines to use these punch cards in order
to calculate numbers. His difference engine number one was to calculate polynomial functions
to 16 digits. And it would also print out those results for you as a test and then press
into a plate so that you could then print those out later using a printing machine.
His analytical engine was supposed to be more general purpose. It was supposed to be that
you could program this machine to perform a calculation for you. And it didn't necessarily
matter which calculation. And after the development of this engine kind of stalled. The difference
engine number one stalled, he only developed the portion that you see on the left hand
side here. He really dug deep into the analytical machine. And after the analytical machine,
he improved his difference engine to be accurate to 31 digits. None of these were actually
built until 150 years later. For a while, you could have seen this in San Francisco.
It's now in a private collection. However, you can go online and see videos of how this
functions to this day. The machine weighs 5 tons. It's huge. And highly impractical.
There are 180,000 moving parts. But imagine if this had actually come into fruition when
it was created. What if it had been 150 years earlier? Someone else who attended his lectures
was Menabrea. He was a brilliant, brilliant mathematician. Babbage gave a lecture at the
University of Turin on his analytical machine. And Menabrea was the one who transcripted
that lecture. The lecture itself was in French. So, he ended up hiring Ada Lovelace to translate
it back into English. Ada Lovelace, as many of you probably know, is actually the daughter
of Lord Byron, and had a volatile relationship with her mother. To the point that her mother
didn't let her learn art or poetry. She didn't want her daughter to be like Lord Byron who
had a mental insufficiency or mental instability streak. The problem, though, as strictly mathematical
as she was, she saw the world in a poetic fashion. When she looked at the machine, she
looked at the drawings for that analytical machine and saw what it could do, she realized
that machines are not meant just for calculating numbers. That they could do so much more.
And that is her genius. That is her contribution. She ended up publishing the work with enough
footnotes to be much longer than the actual work that she transcribed in the first place.
She did have some help from Charles Babbage regarding some of the details of the machine.
The algorithm that she developed was based on a logic structure that previously existed.
So, again, she got a lot of credit because she put it all together. So, quite a few years
later, another 50 or 60 years, we have Herman Hollerith who at his doctorate thesis was
an electronic tabulating machine. The next year, the very first census used punch cards
from his company to mark off each dot for each person. And at that time it wasn't more
of a combination of dots equaled something as much as this dot meant your gender. This
to the meant your demographic. This dot meant where you lived. It was a little bit more
specific. All right. By 1911 his company, combined with three other companies to make
a fifth company called computing tabulating reporting company. Which a few years later
we now know as IBM. In 1928, IBM introduced rectangular hole, 80 column format punch cards.
Which is why to this day our IDEs default to 88 columns. All based on Jacquard loom
punch cards. So, from 1800 to 1924, something that could have technically been developed
by 1840. We very well could have had the industrial Revolution and the computing age much earlier
than we did. So, let's talk a little bit about wartime efforts and knitting. This beautiful
quote I found says, during wartime, where there were knitters, there were often spies.
A pair of eyes watching between the click of two needles. And this was less because
knitting was used for code and more because people didn't pay attention to knitters. Knitter
is grandma sitting in the corner. She's just a woman, as they'd say. But those women were
kind of incredible. So, the very first reference to using knitting in code, or code in knitting,
was Madame Defarge from the Tale of Two Cities written by Charles Dickens in 1859. He referred
to her she was just a blood thirsty woman who would sit in the meetings where they were
arguing about who should be the ones to be hauled off to the guillotine and she would
knit the names and stories of those people into her projects. In all reality, though,
I have to say, Belgium had some of the coolest knitters. There's one woman who parachuted
out of a plane, took her knitting with her, biked around France and not just Belgium,
but France and Germany and would talk to soldiers trying to be helpful and get information
from them. And then turn around and take that information back. She was one of the few that
actually knit some of her information into her work. All right. There's another Belgium
woman whose house and whose window sat over train stations. And so, while she was sitting
there knitting, she would be tapping her foot. And the foot tapping was in Morse code. And
she would be telling her children in the floor below her what she was seeing out the window.
Which trains were going where, where they were coming from, what they had in them, what
time it was, all while a German sergeant was living in their house? Another woman based
on the speed at which she knit was able to do the same thing except as opposed to using
her foot in Morse code, she would do a purl stitch if it was a passenger train and she
would do a yarn over if it was a supply train so they could record how often they came and
when they came based on her rate of knitting. In World War II, the British Office of Censorship
banned people from posting knitting patterns abroad because they were afraid that these
knitting patterns very well could have code in them. And here's one of the reasons they
might have thought that. The sweater I'm wearing today has two messages written into it. I
took the message, converted it to binary, converted binary to knitting stitches and
knitted them into my sweater. So, in this case, ones are knit stitches, zeros are purl
stitches. And yarn overs are the spaces in between the eight characters it takes to make
a letter. So, knitting and crocheting and weaving and stitching and embroidery goes
much farther than just messages and punch cards. There's some beautiful mathematical
things that we can do with crocheting, for instance. So, look at the middle picture.
The top one has two parallel lines. This is what we know as parallel lines. They are two
straight lines that will never cross. But in hyperbolic knitting, all three of those
intersecting lines on the top are parallel to the line below it. And when this woman,
Daina , asked, how? Why? Her teacher said, imagine it. Because we can't show you. And
it wasn't until 20 years later when she had to teach hyperbolic physics and geometry that
she really looked deeply and discovered that it was a crocheting pattern she was looking
at. So, she started crocheting and playing with it a bit and this is what we came up
with. This is one of the first versions and this is what she took to her students and
said, look, if you fold along these lines. They never intersect. It's not that these
are straight lines. It's that they are straight on the plane themselves. If you fold it into
a straight line, that's what they are. But if you look at them in comparison to the line
below it, they suffer so that they never touch. They curve into each other and out. It wasn't
until 1990s that we were able to actually visualize hyperbolic geometry. Because crocheting
is the only form of fabric that actually allows us to play with it and interact with it and
see it for the first time. Another version of this is the Lorenz Manifold. Though the
hyperbolic geometry was the first time a crocheting pattern was printed in a scientific journal,
this was the second only a few years later. All right. So, this is a simplified model
of equations describing the rising and cooling of hot air. Otherwise known as thermal convection
in the atmosphere. But this is the only way that we have been able to determine that we
can visualize these things. That we can play with them and move them and swirl them and
see them in a way that's stable. And in this sense, these fiber arts, these things that
old women knit while nobody paid attention to them, were the ways to discover mathematics.
Something that a lot of people are really familiar with because we wear them a lot these
days is infinity columns. They're Moebius strips. But something we have a lot of difficulty
interacting with it w is a Klein bottle, which is a three dimensional Moebius strip. Every
side is the outside. Every side is the inside. You can put your finger on one spot and wrap
all the way around and touch every surface without lifting. Without folding into an inside.
And beyond mathematics, we also have data visualization. There's something impactful
about having color and texture in front of you like this. This scarf is not actually
every day and one year. It's one day for a hundred years. This is defining what global
warming looks like over time. In another one, they decided to map their sleep patterns of
their children. When they were babies. Their first year. And they can see how they went
from very erratic and who knows when to something much more stable. And in the third one, a
woman who really, really hated her commute some days and was loving it on others would
knit different colors based on what the delay was that day. And that ended up selling on
eBay for $8600. Right? And sometimes the art itself can be the technology. All right? This
is actually functioning pianos. Functioning keys. Functions sensor. And just touch and
gesture motion sensors. Or sometimes it's just a QR code to allow you to connect to
the Wi Fi. But my question at this point is, is knitting a programming language? How far
have we really come with this? And if you look at knitting, there's really only these
three stitches. Unlike crocheting there's hundreds, thousands. Same thing with embroidery.
Knitting only has these three. May do them in different orders, may knit three together.
But in the end, it's just a knit stitch. And the purl is an opposite side of a knit stitch
so you're just doing it backwards. And a warn over is just a way to make space. Which is
how I made this sweater. Knowing that, how many of you can read this? Okay. This is a
full knitting language. This is this is the this is in fact us programming. We have
to figure out so many things in our heads. Like, how many multiples and then how many
we have to add. We have asterisks, we have parentheses, we have two last stitches. And
if you really, really look at this, you'll recognize that this is what it is. All we're
doing is we're saying, we have a couple we have some stitches that we have to do before
the loop starts. And then we have our loop. Or a do while in this case. Do purl one knit
three where we have more than three stitches left. And then we purl one and two. So, though
this pattern actually shows how we knit every row, the entire project, including the entire
brocade stitch, is on my GitHub repo. Let's see if this will let me do it. Nope. So, this
is essentially how it works. So, if you take those stitches and we say we want 18 inches.
And we knit 6 stitches per inch and we want our diamond brocade stitch, it prints out
not only how many cast on stitches that fit within those eight stitches, plus one. But
also every knit and purl that's in those repeats. So, we could either do this...
Or we could do that. So, I have one last quote for you. From a lovely woman named Linda Liukas.
She has a really energetic TED Talk that's just magical. I highly recommend you watch
it. There's a link on the slides. And near the middle, she said and that's why no one
recognized that when I was conjugating French or irregular verbs, I was actually practicing
my pattern recognition skills. And when I was excited about knitting, I was actually
following a sequence of symbolic commands that included loops inside of them. And that
Bernard Russell's lifelong quest to find an exact language between English and mathematics
found its home inside a computer. I was a computer programmer. But nobody knew it. We
went from an 18th century fashion fad in France all the way to mathematics and science and
is knitting a programming language? I have two points that I wanted to make. One, is
we all stand on the shoulders of giants. And just because your idea may not be absolutely
unique in every fashion, doesn't change the fact that it's yours and it's important and
it should be heard. And the other is that sometimes you have to step away from the computer
and play with something to truly discover something unique. I'm Jen Luker. You can find
me on Twitter. And if you want to know more information, I have quite a few. Please come
talk to me. Thank you. [ Applause ]
PARISS: All right. We're gonna break until 4:30.