• Members 599 posts
    March 11, 2024, 11:01 p.m.

    Possibly, but the real reason is that because I have researched it intensely for many years and know better than to be drawn down a rabbit hole that requires me to produce an essay about a subject I don't need to prove to others. I'm too lazy for that just as the other person is too lazy to get an accurate assessment.

  • Members 599 posts
    March 11, 2024, 11:15 p.m.

    Sorry Bob, I believe you know exactly what I'm referring to, but you want to play coy. Where were you when Musk revealed election interference and media content censorship during Twittergate. Are you denying that there was no twittergate? Or does that have all the 'hallmarks of Russian disinformation'?
    The lawfare and weaponization of the FBI, CIA, DOJ against political opponents is acceptable to you? Putin took out his main opponent in old KGB Stalinist fashion whilst Biden is doing the same thing with Trump [rhetorically speaking] but in a less murderous fashion.
    If you are wearing blinders, or a staunchly entrenched Democrat that pretends to deny any of this is occurring, then you should probably be a spin artist propagandist for the left. I think you know better.

  • Members 599 posts
    March 11, 2024, 11:24 p.m.

    It's a topic that takes too much time to explain. A rabbit hole I'm too lazy to get into to be honest. I don't expect you really want to investigate it further because it is very time consuming to look up and peel away the bullshit from the truth. But who knows, maybe the bullshit is what you are truly after...just to support a weak point of argument.

  • Members 599 posts
    March 11, 2024, 11:39 p.m.

    LMAO...are you kidding me? It isn't an ageist thingy. It is a capability assessment and Biden is NOT capable. Furthermore, he is a fool and a buffoon. He is the laughing stock around the world! Peeps with ostrich DNA in the DNC only believe [forced allegiance of course] he is capable of being a third term POTUS for Obama.

  • Members 599 posts
    March 11, 2024, 11:46 p.m.

    Don't be a VP:
    www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4vgtBHpA1I

  • Members 166 posts
    March 11, 2024, 11:58 p.m.

    I'm sorry that you even hypothesize such things about me. What I want to see is everyone pulling back from extremist positions and the prospect of 'nuclear' political war in my country that can lead to mutual destruction. Really, your words in this thread only emphasize how hardened you are in your beliefs and how much you will refuse to move toward the middle, the zone of compromise. Your fondness for pejorative terms ('bullshit from the truth', 'woketards', 'mediatards', 'ostrich DNA', etc.) is very telling. So much so that there is no need for you to say more in order for others to understand what your position is: Contrary to sounding like you have any depth of knowledge, you only bring shame on yourself that way. Positions like that are a big part of the problem here.

  • Members 86 posts
    March 12, 2024, 12:12 a.m.

    I have a bridge to sell if anyone's interested, no? 'Spose it's back to photography then...

    That's the trouble with photography, it never transcends that barrier and exists purely as an abstract or a memory/wish in the viewers eye. A press photo is an actual event and has a reality attached and that more often than not clashes with our romantic viewpoint. So what do you do? To ban the photo would in effect be saying that we want it to reflect our perception of the human condition not the truth of it.

    James Baldwin has said much the same about US politics, you've been voting for your perception of how you want to be for so long you've lost sight of just how far you've strayed from the truth.

    It's about time the world woke up and saw the truth in the photo, understood how it differs from what our perception of what we want it to be. Then perhaps we could work on a world with an honest casual embrace instead of just creating the perception it exists.

    Just a thought...

  • Members 599 posts
    March 12, 2024, 3:56 a.m.

    So it is the bullshit you are really after, because your statement reveals how so far left you are...that you can't even see how the Democrats are weaponizing the DOJ, FBI and CIA and using the corrupt media to cover for them. Why don't YOU meet in the center to soothe your anxiety about nuclear whatever?

  • Members 599 posts
    March 12, 2024, 4:11 a.m.

    Ai will just skew that even more...

  • Members 676 posts
    March 12, 2024, 7:53 a.m.

    ???

    The photo in the OP is not "cancelled", so your use of the word "another" is misplaced.

    From your link:

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#Criticism

    The use of the image has produced controversy because Playboy is "seen (by some) as being degrading to women".[20] In a 1999 essay on reasons for the male predominance in computer science, applied mathematician Dianne P. O'Leary wrote:

    Suggestive pictures used in lectures on image processing ... convey the message that the lecturer caters to the males only. For example, it is amazing that the "Lena" pin-up image is still used as an example in courses and published as a test image in journals today.[4]

    A 2012 paper on compressed sensing used a photo of the model Fabio Lanzoni as a test image to draw attention to this issue.[22][23][24][25]

    The use of the test image at the magnet school Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia provoked a guest editorial by a senior in The Washington Post in 2015 about its detrimental impact on aspiring female students in computer science.[7]

    In 2017, the Journal of Modern Optics published an editorial titled "On alternatives to Lenna"[6] suggesting three images (Pirate, Cameraman, and Peppers) that "are reasonably close to Lenna in feature space".

    In 2018, the Nature Nanotechnology journal announced that they would no longer consider articles using the Lenna image.[3] In the same year SPIE, the publishers of Optical Engineering, also announced that they "strongly discourage" the use of the Lenna image, and would no longer consider new submissions containing the image "without convincing scientific justification for its use". They noted that aside from the copyright and ethical issues, that it was also no longer useful as a standard image: "In today's age of high-resolution digital image technology, it seems difficult to argue that a 512 × 512 image produced with a 1970s-era analog scanner is the best we have to offer as an image quality test standard".[2]

    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."[10]

    I count one editorial and one school criticizing the use of the photo for a scientific standard, and one technical criticism, "it seems difficult to argue that a 512 × 512 image produced with a 1970s-era analog scanner is the best we have to offer as an image quality test standard", which seems to make sense.

    So, how is the image "cancelled"? Or do one editorial writer and one magnet school have that kind of power?

  • March 12, 2024, 8:18 a.m.

    Not an explanation of meaning, just a repetition. People use the term 'cancel culture', but what does it actually mean? Seems to mean people using their freedom of expression not to do things that you would prefer them to do - in particular not to be offensive when you, presumably, would prefer that they were gratuitously offensive.

    Why should I 'want to see' the delusions and fallacies under which you seem to want to operate? I don't see the point because there is no point. Editors deciding not to include content that people might find offensive is their right - you might moan about it, but it's not 'fascist-like'. In fact you moan selectively, the cases that you moan about are there anti-fascist-like cases. A previous president of the USA proposed legal action against people who knelt for the American national anthem. I don't see you getting upset about that, presumably because those people are using their freedom in a way that you don't approve of. Or what about the fact that most popular media based in the USA won't publish images containing female nipples, purely due to pressure from religious groups. Why aren't you upset about that?

    No I'm not joking. What I said is the truth, as I see it. There is a difference in approach here. You seem to want to prove things 'true' by quoting the opinion selectively chosen authorities. That's never been my approach - I always want to work through the logic and reason of a case and make up my mind for myself. If my mind ends up in opposition to people who consider themselves to be 'authorities' that that's their problem.

    What I said about Lena is correct - there's nothing special about it as a test case. It has only become popular by repetition - the image you use if you're too lazy to select something that actually does the job properly. That's more or less what your quote from the publishers of JMO says. In fact none of your 'evidence' suggests any more than it's widely used - nothing says it has any special properties as a test image that makes it essential. For myself, I don't care much one way or the other about the image itself, but if some people find it offensive, why insist on using it if there are alternatives? It's what any civil person would do, unless the actuality is that they don't like the reason that other people find it offensive and are trying to make a political point. Elevating it to the level of Leonardo is purely performative outrage. Performative outrage is something that I personally find both offensive and amusing. Still, in an open society people have the right to be performatively outraged, and others have the right to poke a little fun at them.

  • March 12, 2024, 8:53 a.m.

    There is one little bit, why it has become special by repetition - you can easily compare results of different image processing algorithms, using exactly same source image. I've read numerous (older) papers about noise removal, motion detection, deconvolution and so on - they usually include many other images, but Lena image is often included too and I can just by looking at it compare results (or some aspect of results) of different algorithms.

  • March 12, 2024, 11:48 a.m.

    Yes, that is true, but the other point I made is also relevant - that the Lena image is no longer suitable for today's performance requirements. It doesn't provide a stern enough test either in resolution or tonality terms. In those days, when it was used to test the early image compression algorithms, something that sort of looked OK having gone through the compression mill was a pass. Nowadays we are concerned about JPEG artefacts, extended DR and the like, it's something easily passed by any algorithm that is pushing the state of the art.

    On the overall question, I think what we're witnessing is a battle of performative outrage. Neither the image that started the thread not 'Lena' are objectionable unless you know the back story - so publishing just as an image, without the backstory, clearly is not promoting any questionable behaviour that occurred in that backstory - so I think the decision on editors part to deprecate them seems to me a bit silly. Perhaps a bit less silly in the case of the one in the OP, because that is a museum-like, curated setting where the back story has some more relevance - but without that any viewer will just take it as a very happy sailor kissing his loved one.

    However it is the right of editors to choose what and what not to publish, even if I think it's a bit silly. So the performative outrage of those demanding that the editors make different choices is more than a bit silly - it's also threatening - because the obvious corollary, which you will notice that JACS didn't respond to, is that editors be forced to make decisions which the outraged agree with. The context is all important, because the target of the outrage is always politically loaded. So, if the editors choice involves the correction of some perceived inequality, either racial or gender based, that is when the outrage is turned on. I watched an interesting video of a conversation between Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears. In it Miley tells Britney that she had wanted to perform at the MTV awards show topless, but MTV wouldn't allow it. They likely would have had she been male. Where is the outrage at the cancelling of Miley's nipples? Rather the performative outrage gets directed at Taylor Swift encouraging people to vote, obviously a deeply subversive thing to be doing.

  • March 12, 2024, 1 p.m.

    Belong to neither the loony left nor the rabid right. However, there are some things which are true which people still deny happened (and don't ask me for ecxamples - I am not going down that rabbit hole).

    I'd like to get this whole conversation closed - we will not change peoples opinions through a forum.

    So, let's get back to photography and leave the politics (or lack of it) to other forums.

    Alan