Discusses "Lena", the 1972 Playboy centerfold used for jpeg (and many other) algorithm verification.
One of his illustrations is the Internatiol Prototype Kilogram, used between 1889 and 2019 to define a standard for the basic unit of weight. The actual IPK is a palm-sized cylinder of platfinum-iridium alloy stored in triple-layer bell jars in an underground vault outside Paris. In order to verify this object's mass and create copies to be used as reference measures around the world the IPK had to be washed, cleaned and weighed, before being compared to six sibling kilograms. The process, as Mulvin recounts it, is beautifully ritualistic. The cleaner must soak a piece of chamois leather in a mixture of ether and ethanol for 48 hours to ensure full absorption, then rub down the IPK before washing it with steam and removed excess water with filter paper. To ensure that no impurities are left on the kilogram's body (or at least that the same impurities are left each time), every aspect of this sacrament is minutely quantified, from the amount of pressure to be applied with the chamois (10 kPa) to the wattage of the equipment used to generate the steam (350 W) and the distance of the steam nozzle from the kilogram's body (5mm).
'China Girls' whose faces were inserted like subliminal messages at the start of film reels to calibrate colours from the projection booth, to the 'Shirley Cards' distributed by Kodak to fulfil a similar role in commercial photography [...] In the case of the Shirley Cards, the exclusive use of white models in early calibration tests meant that the world's most popular film stock failed to capture the detail of other skin colours. [...] Beginning in the 1960s, Kodak slowly began to fix this bias in its film, but not out of any sense of racial injustice: it was a response to complaints from furtnutre makers and chocolate sellers that Kodak cameras couldn't properly capture their products' hues.
