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NB The correct spelling of her name is "Lena", but she asked Playboy to spell it "Lenna" because she did not want people to call her "Leena".
Finding Lena, the Patron Saint of JPEGs
Among some computer engineers, Lena is a mythic figure, a mononym on par with Woz or Zuck. Whether or not you know her face, you’ve used the technology it helped create; practically every photo you’ve ever taken, every website you’ve ever visited, every meme you’ve ever shared owes some small debt to Lena. Yet today, as a 67-year-old retiree living in her native Sweden, she remains a little mystified by her own fame. “I’m just surprised that it never ends,” she told me recently.
Lena’s path to iconhood began in the pages of Playboy. 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. (At her suggestion, the editors spelled her first name with an extra “n,” to encourage proper pronunciation. “I didn’t want to be called Leena,” she explained.)
About six months later, a copy of the issue turned up at the University of Southern California’s Signal and Image Processing Institute, where Alexander Sawchuk and his team happened to be looking for a new photograph against which to test their latest compression algorithm—the math that would make unwieldy image files manageable. Lena’s glossy centerfold, with its complex mixture of colors and textures, was the perfect candidate. They tore off the top third of the spread, ran it through a set of analog-to-digital converters, and saved the resulting 512-line scan to their Hewlett-Packard 2100. (Sawchuk did not respond to requests for comment.)
The USC team proudly handed out copies to lab visitors, and soon the image of the young model looking coquettishly over her bare shoulder became an industry standard, replicated and reanalyzed billions of times as what we now know as the JPEG came into being. According to James Hutchinson, an editor at the University of Illinois College of Engineering, Lena was for engineers “something like what Rita Hayworth was for US soldiers in the trenches of World War II.”
For almost as long as the Lenna has been idolized among computer scientists, however, it has also been a source of controversy. “I have heard feminists argue that the image should be retired,” David C. Munson Jr., current president of the Rochester Institute of Technology, wrote back in 1996. Yet, 19 years later, the Lenna remained so ubiquitous that Maddie Zug, a high school senior from Virginia, felt compelled to write an op-ed about it in The Washington Post. The image, she explained, had elicited “sexual comments” from the boys in her class, and its continuing inclusion in the curriculum was evidence of a broader “culture issue.”
Deanna Needell, a math professor at UCLA, had similar memories from college, so in 2013 she and a colleague staged a quiet protest: They acquired the rights to a head shot of the male model Fabio Lanzoni and used that for their imaging research instead. But perhaps the most stringent critic of the image is Emily Chang, author of Brotopia. “The prolific use of Lena’s photo can be seen as a harbinger of behavior within the tech industry,” she writes in the book’s opening chapter. “In Silicon Valley today, women are second-class citizens and most men are blind to it.” For Chang, the moment that Lena’s centerfold was torn and scanned marked “tech’s original sin.”
One voice that has been conspicuously missing from the Lenna debate is that of Lena herself. The first and last time she spoke with the American press was in 1997, at the same conference where she was given her beloved mantel clock. (WIRED ran a short article on the visit titled “Playmate Meets Geeks Who Made Her a Net Star.”)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SemperOSS on Monday February 18 2019, @08:01PM (3 children)
Keeping up with moral standards around the world — like walking a minefield blindfolded — is always difficult. As much as I respect every person as a person — not necessarily their behaviour — I find that the prudish stance of many people these day a step back. So maybe a short trip through the last 2000 years in Europe could help put things in perspective?
In Roman times people (probably more the patricians than the plebeians, I guess) did apparently not much care about prudishness, as the excavations from Pompeii show. Then came along the dark history of Christianity, where moral standards rapidly became prudish with increasing pietistic behaviour — just think the English Buggery Act 1533 (penalising homosexual activity by death). More to the point here, the moral standards of English Victorian times required women to be covered from neck to feet and even the sight of a woman's ankle was deemed lascivious. Then the tide turned and in the sixties and early seventies nudity was again fairly permissible, sort of, only to turn again with renewed prudishness. This, paired with political correctness, is making communication very difficult as many things — like Voldemort of the Harry Potter stories — cannot be named any more.
Back to the story at hand: So you cannot use a test image of a young woman showing a bare shoulder as it is sexist, ostensibly? I am not entirely sure why it is sexist. Because it is in fact a crop of a picture of a nude woman from Playboy? Or because it is of a woman and not a man? Or should it have been of a cat? A dog? A horse? A tree? ... I am not sure. A lot of the opposition, I think, is due to the fact that some choices stem from men being men and hormones being, well, hormones that often run wild in younger people — like university students. I am not trying to excuse any and all behaviour of men, but attacking the choice of this image on feminist grounds due to its heritage is a bit beyond me.
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
Maybe I should add a sarcasm warning now and again?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Unixnut on Monday February 18 2019, @11:58PM
Well, if you want prudishness, you could go with the 3D modellers, their reference image is a teapot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot [wikipedia.org]
Although I am sure someone, somehow, will get offended by it. Among a vocal minority it's almost a competition of who can get the most offended by something nowadays.
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Tuesday February 19 2019, @03:37AM
"Officer! Officer! Arrest that man! He's whistling a dirty song!".
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday February 20 2019, @05:51PM
Walking a minefield blindfolded is pretty easy, for a while.