Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs • Hacker News Board

Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#21

Post by yawaramin » Sun, Feb 17, 2019, 3:01 AM UTC

iamleppert wrote: post #12

What’s wrong with female beauty? It’s not like it’s porn or a nude image. I’m not even a straight male but I can still appreciate female beauty and I don’t think it’s sexist. The photo is more artistic than anything. I wonder if the same people who complain about this photo lodge similar complaints when they visit art museums that have female nudity in oil paintings or nude female sculptures? I know nudity and even a…

Because it's not about you. It's about the women who see the image, understand its history, and see it as another reminder of how tech is not just male-dominated but thoughtlessly so (having Playboy issues lying around in the research lab) and where women are literally reduced to objects. From the article:

> “As silly as it sounds, they were surprised she was a real person,” he told me.

Women notice stuff like that, I guess.

Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#22

Post by erik_seaberg » Sun, Feb 17, 2019, 3:10 AM UTC

regularfry wrote: post #7

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #3

> The small army of women who had worked as so-called computers during the first half of the 20th century were leaving the tech industry in droves, as computing went from being perceived as a form of menial labor to a more cerebral, masculine pursuit. Isn't this rather misleading? Obviously there were women in early computing who were very influential. But weren't the "human computers" in fact performing tedious and…

No, it's not misleading. The change was in perception, not in the nature of the task. Yes, there were women who did rote calculations, but those weren't the roles influential to how the role evolved.

"Programmer" used to be the job of turning prose or flowcharts from a "systems analyst" into a deck of machine instructions. The uncreative grunt work making up half of the profession got completely automated away.

Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#23

Post by userbinator » Sun, Feb 17, 2019, 3:19 AM UTC

GuB-42 wrote: post #13

aboutruby wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please note that we no longer distribute the following images that were previously available in our database: 4.2.04 (lena), 4.2.02 (tiffany), elaine.512, numbers.512 and testpat.1k. Although these images have played a significant role in the history of image processing, they no longer represent the best examples for future research.

It there a reason why these images "no longer represent the best examples for future research"? How is Lena inferior to the other "female" images? Lena seems to offer a good mix of highly detailed textures, smooth gradients and sharp edges. Maybe there are copyright reasons but Playboy seems to be fine with the use that the Lena image is made of.

Almost certainly pressure from the PC crowd...

elaine.512 doesn't seem particularly pornographic, but perhaps she's from Playboy too (anyone know?)

Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#24

Post by hatmatrix » Sun, Feb 17, 2019, 4:10 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #6

ChuckMcM wrote: post #5

Oh that is fun, I was one of the operators at the USC Image Processing Institute who did scanning, ran the systems (initially a the HP2100, then a PDP 11/40, and later a PDP 11/55t. We did lots of tours and we had a number of graduate students working on various issues. One of the things we did was to provide the 512 x 512 set of reference images on 1600BPI magnetic tape to researchers. Each image was stored as a red…

The images (well, most of them) are online: http://sipi.usc.edu/database/

Is this like the ImageNet of old?

Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#25

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Feb 17, 2019, 4:44 AM UTC

iamleppert wrote: post #12

What’s wrong with female beauty? It’s not like it’s porn or a nude image. I’m not even a straight male but I can still appreciate female beauty and I don’t think it’s sexist. The photo is more artistic than anything. I wonder if the same people who complain about this photo lodge similar complaints when they visit art museums that have female nudity in oil paintings or nude female sculptures? I know nudity and even a…

[deleted]

Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#26

Post by jancsika » Sun, Feb 17, 2019, 4:45 AM UTC

iamleppert wrote: post #12

What’s wrong with female beauty? It’s not like it’s porn or a nude image. I’m not even a straight male but I can still appreciate female beauty and I don’t think it’s sexist. The photo is more artistic than anything. I wonder if the same people who complain about this photo lodge similar complaints when they visit art museums that have female nudity in oil paintings or nude female sculptures? I know nudity and even a…

> What’s wrong with female beauty?

It's a facile concept that is extremely difficult to decouple from a whole set of nasty, narrow social expectations for women that have nothing to do with aesthetics.

If you want to get a sense of just how nasty, do the social experiment of discussing one of the many subculture of biological males who present convincingly as female. It's hard to analyze the resulting physical unease and non-sequiturs as anything other than a confusion of aesthetics with... everything else, really.

Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#27

Post by analog31 » Sun, Feb 17, 2019, 4:50 AM UTC

erik_seaberg wrote: post #22

regularfry wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not misleading. The change was in perception, not in the nature of the task. Yes, there were women who did rote calculations, but those weren't the roles influential to how the role evolved.

"Programmer" used to be the job of turning prose or flowcharts from a "systems analyst" into a deck of machine instructions. The uncreative grunt work making up half of the profession got completely automated away.

I know a person who had that kind of job, and eventually started fixing bugs in the code because it was easier than tracking down the analyst. She gradually morphed into being a full fledged programmer in the contemporary sense, now nearing retirement.

Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#28

Post by Jun8 » Sun, Feb 17, 2019, 4:52 AM UTC

In addition to lenna old timer image processing researchers would also have fond (depending whether your compression or edge detection algorithm worked correctly or not) memories of girl, cameraman, and barbara images as well as the infamous baboon (https://goo.gl/images/4Js7YH).

I remember doing my senior thesis on 2D LPC in 1990 and since we did not know how to print images, in our report we just printed the pixel values as numbers. Ahh, the good old times.

Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#29

Post by iamleppert » Sun, Feb 17, 2019, 5:03 AM UTC

jahewson wrote: post #20

iamleppert wrote: post #12

What’s wrong with female beauty? It’s not like it’s porn or a nude image. I’m not even a straight male but I can still appreciate female beauty and I don’t think it’s sexist. The photo is more artistic than anything. I wonder if the same people who complain about this photo lodge similar complaints when they visit art museums that have female nudity in oil paintings or nude female sculptures? I know nudity and even a…

No, it is a nude image. They just cropped out her face. Google it. I have no idea why the article didn’t actually point that out? Once you understand that the piece makes sense.

I mean the test image itself shows no nudity. It's a woman's face. Regardless of the source, I do think it shows respect and discretion that they cropped out the nude part. It shows that they at least thought a nude image would be unprofessional in a professional setting.

Personally, I found the story of her life interesting and uplifting (especially about her days at Kodak). If they had selected a landscape or airforce test pattern, we wouldn't have this wonderful story or be getting to read about this woman's life. It's a human connection and history of a time that may have been operating under different social norms.

It's a unique part of the culture and a personal story and it saddens me that some people are able to find negativity in it, just because of the source, and I find it very disrespectful to Lena herself -- there's nothing wrong with how she lived her life or what she did to earn her current minor celebrity.

Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

#30

Post by Buge » Sun, Feb 17, 2019, 5:10 AM UTC

jahewson wrote: post #20

iamleppert wrote: post #12

What’s wrong with female beauty? It’s not like it’s porn or a nude image. I’m not even a straight male but I can still appreciate female beauty and I don’t think it’s sexist. The photo is more artistic than anything. I wonder if the same people who complain about this photo lodge similar complaints when they visit art museums that have female nudity in oil paintings or nude female sculptures? I know nudity and even a…

No, it is a nude image. They just cropped out her face. Google it. I have no idea why the article didn’t actually point that out? Once you understand that the piece makes sense.

>No, it is a nude image. I have no idea why the article didn’t actually point that out?

The article essentially said it:

>In 1972, at the age of 21, she appeared as Miss November, wearing nothing but a feathered sun hat, boots, stockings, and a pink boa.