James Vincent - "Keep It Clean", discussing Dylan Mulvin's "Proxies: The cultural work of standing in"

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.

 

 

Made to measure - why we can't stop quantifying our lives

bhttps://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/may/26/measurement-why-we-cant-stop-quantifying-our-lives

Standard reference materials, or SRMs, created by NIST [...] others seem like ingredients lifted from God's pantry: ingots of purified elements and pressurised canisters of gases, available in finely graded blends and mixtures. Some are just whimsical, as if they were the creation of an overly zealous bureaucracy determined to standardise even the most peculiar substances. Think: domestic sludge, whale blubber and powdered radioactive human lung, available as SRMs 2781, 1945, and 4351.
    Each has a purpose, however. Domestic sludge, for example, is used as a reference by environmental agencies to check pollutant levels in factories. Standardised whale blubber helps scientists track the buildup of chemical contaminants in the ocean. Powdered lung, meanwhile, is used as a benchmark for human exposure to radioactive materials.

10,000 steps. It’s often cited as an ideal daily target for activity, and built into countless tracking apps and fitness programmes. Walk 10,000 steps a day, we’re told, and health and happiness awaits.

    This number is presented with such authority and ubiquity you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the result of scientific enquiry, the distilled wisdom of numerous tests and trials. But no. Its origins are in a marketing campaign by a Japanese company called Yamasa Clock. In 1965, the company was promoting a then-novel gadget, a digital pedometer, and needed a snappy name for their new product. They settled on manpo-kei, or “10,000-steps meter”. But why was this number chosen? Because the kanji for 10,000 – and hence the first character in the product’s Japanese name, 万歩計 – looks like a figure striding forward with confidence. There was no science to justify 10,000 steps, it seems – just a visual pun.