It’s named after the multi-decade data compression test image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

skrebbel 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Just sharing that I bought Valuable Humans in Transit some years ago and I concur that it's very nice. It's a tiny booklet full of short stories like Lena that are way out there. Maximum cool per gram of paper.

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xyzsparetimexyz 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That feels grossly inappropriate

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pyrale 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you read the original text, what happens in that story is also grossly inappropriate. Maybe that's the parallel.

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nice_byte 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

could you be more specific?

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direwolf20 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Lena is no longer used as a test image because it's porn. It's banned from several journals because it's porn. As in they will reject any paper that uses Lena no matter the technical content.

The reasons usually given for choosing this image are all just rationalisations — Lena is used the most because it's porn and image compression researchers are all male. It belongs as part of a test set, sure, but there's no reason it should be the single most used image. Except because its porn.

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toxik 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The woman herself says she never had a problem with it being famous. The actual test image is obviously not porn, either. But anything to look progressive, I guess.

	▲	wahnfrieden 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		From the link above > Forsén stated in the 2019 documentary film Losing Lena, "I retired from modeling a long time ago. It's time I retired from tech, too... Let's commit to losing me."

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nice_byte 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Everybody knows that. The GP's reaction is what perplexes me. Are they saying the name of the story is inappropriate? I think it's very appropriate.

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simoncion 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Lena is no longer used as a test image because it's porn.

The Lenna test image can be seen over the text "Click above for the original as a TIFF image." at [0]. If you consider that to be porn, then I find your opinion on what is and is not porn to be worthless.

The test image is a cropped portion of porn, but if a safe-for-work image would be porn but for what you can't see in the image, then any picture of any human ever is porn as we're all nude under our clothes.

For additional commentary (published in 1996) on the history and controversy about the image, see [1].

[0] <http://www.lenna.org/>

[1] <https://web.archive.org/web/20010414202400/http://www.nofile...>

	▲	saagarjha 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Nudity is not pornography. Intent matters.
	▲	nice_byte 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		the "porn" angle is very funny to me, since there is nothing pornographic or inapropriate about the image. when I was young, I used to think it was some researcher's wife whom he loved so much he decide to use her picture absolutely everywhere. it's sufficient to say that the person depicted has withdrawn their consent for that image to be used, and that should put an end to the conversation.