knitting is binary

Yesterday I was knitting up a swatch of my sock yarn to try out my new double pointed needles (dpns) while I was waiting for the guy coming to pick up my old washer and dryer. Knitting is a very binary activity. All knitting essentially boils down to 2 stitches: knit and purl. Knit is the opposite of purl and purl is the opposite of knit. They complete each other. Everything else is made up of combinations of knit and purl, a lot like machine code is made up of 1s and 0s. In fact, you could conceivably write knitting patterns as rows of 1s and 0s. Of course it would be even more self explanatory to write it in 'V's and '-'s, but essentially it's still binary, one or the other. So a knitting pattern is sort of like a higher level computer language, because instead of lists of 'V's and '-'s you end up with stuff like:
CO 20 sts
k to end of 1st row
(k2 p2) 5 times
...

And a knitter would know what that means. The knitter is the processor, his/her brain is the compiler or script interpreter. The yarn is the data and the needles are the memory. The difference so far between me and the machine is that I can start a pattern and decide that I don't like how it's turning out and tweak it. In order for a computer to make that decision, someone has to program it to, and give it the parameters for when different decisions should be made, and how and *poof* suddenly the computer is no longer making decisions, it's just following through on what someone told it to do.

Enough pseudo-random ramblings for now...