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