My High School CS Homework Is the Centerfold

theodp writes: To paraphrase the J. Geils Band, Maddie Zug's high school computer science homework is the centerfold. In a Washington Post op-ed, Zug, a student at the top-ranked Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, argues that a centerfold does not belong in the classroom. "I first saw a picture of Playboy magazine's Miss November 1972 a year ago as a junior at TJ," Zug explains. "My artificial intelligence teacher told our class to search Google for Lena Soderberg (not the full image, though!) and use her picture to test our latest coding assignment...Soderberg has a history with computer science. In the 1970s, male programmers at the University of Southern California needed to test their image-processing algorithm. They scanned what they had handy: the centerfold of a Playboy magazine. Before long, the image became a convention in industry and academia." (Wikipedia has a nice background, too.)

Comments

I'm offended by the elitist 1% Mesa teapot

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mesa Teapot is an outrage to hard-working lower and middle-class developers too. To use such an upper-crust elite symbol as a teapot, partially a symbol of British oppression, is offensive to me.

Re:Dumb stuff

[twistedcubic]

It is not a standard head shot. It is a sexualized model. If a woman is looking at you in a sexually suggestive way, you don't have to see her naked body to realize she is looking at you in a suggestive way. Twenty years of cheap digital cameras and we still have this shit. Damn.

Isn't it a poor test image anyway?

[wonkey_monkey]

From a purely technical POV, it's never seemed like a great test image to me. It's soft, the red channel is washed out, the blue channel is noisy, there's absolutely no green or cyan (in the sense of pixels where green is the strongest channel, or red is the weakest channel) and very little blue.

Also, they cropped out her knockers and bum.