It's just a standard image of a woman wearing a hat that has a lot of dynamic colors and allows people to check and compare graphic transforms easily - there is nothing offensive about it. Unless, of course, you find colorful pictures of women wearing hats offensive.
Why should anyone's opinion matter except for Lenna's own? You are complaining about an uncoerced act.
For reference: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/lenna.shtml
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/arsclas...
And yes, the AVR proved woefully inadequate as you point out, but we were required to use it so not much we could do there. The project was loads of fun (and work!) anyways, and it was great to be able to put theory into practice for once :) If anyone have any questions regarding the project I'd be happy to answer them by the way.
Video of the 256 Shades of Gray machine in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOXzD_7pL4M&list=PLA329EE...
(But, and I'll gladly take the karma hit for saying this, please don't pay any attention to my fellow HNers complaining about every possible tangential non-issue.)
