Prompted by a recent posting in the knitlist about how some knitters like to "sign" their garments by adding their names in a single line of knitting as morse code (two color knitting).; The question was asked -- could it be done in binary.; The answer is yes as either two color knitting or combinations of knit and purl stitches.
Our everyday number system is called Decimal and is base 10.; We count from 0 to 9 and then start over but increasing the ordinal number: 9 goes to 10 (ordinal increased by 1 in the ones spot and the new ordinal placed next to the first ordinal re-sets to the beginning of the set = 0).; There are as many number systems as there are numbers, but many don't make sense to use.
The other non-base 10 system you are used to is Time.; It uses divisions of 60.; 60 seconds is one minute, 60 minutes is one hour.; Two other heavily used bases are base 2 commonly known as binary and base 16 commonly known as hexadecimal.; These two bases are used by computers because they interchange well and fit the machine architecture.;
Everything in a computer is stored as 0's and 1's which is binary.; Each 1 or 0 is called a bit.; 8 bits make a byte. 1 byte is a character (letter space number on the keyboard).; Since computers are world wide gadgets there are many alphabets and symbologies in use so they needed a really easy way to represent each character in the world.;
So along comes hexidecimal.; Base 16 uses the "numbers" 0 - F.; The complete set of digits is as follows 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F.; So 9 does not go to 10 but to A.; F goes to 10.; Each digit represents 8 bits or 1 byte.; Each character in the world has been given 4 bytes (16 bits) to be able to be represented.; The nice thing is that they convert "inline".; This means that if you line up 4 hexadecimal digits (HEX from here on out) and convert to their binary counterparts it is lined up exactly as it would appear in a computers memory.
EXAMPLE: the hex digit F is 1111 in binary and the hex digit 2 is 0010 so if we would take the combined hex number of F2 and convert to binary we just push their values together: 1111 + 0010 = 11110010 (8 bits).
Well, it is real easy to see that the ones and zeros in a binary number easily convert to either knit and purl stitches or two colors of knit (or purl) stitches.; So we can take names, quotes or any text and convert then to binary and work them into our knitting projects.; I will cover the conversion into a knit/purl pattern
Andrea Whiteside heras_mom@citlink.net
The basic process is as follows:
Each character in your phrase/name will require 8 stitches (assumes English, standard alphabet.; Other languages could take up to 16 stitches per letter).