American in Spain

Today I finally got around to attempting a bit of Photoshop trickery I’ve been wanting to try, creating a photo of me dancing with my two-year-old daughter where our sizes are adjusted, either me down to her height, or her up to mine. It turns out that this is very, very hard to do well. The principal difficulty is aligning the hands, in space and with the proper angles, so that they appear to touch. Of the five or so photos I took to work with, I chose the best two to merge together. The result is a photo where the viewer is never really fooled into thinking that the two people are actually interacting physically.
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Last week, we had quite the deluge, which coincided, unfortunately, with me having to drive 120 km. I noticed that whenever I slowed down, the rear window would get wet and hard to see out of. Once I sped up again, one wiper pass dried it off and it stayed dry until I slowed down again. This is an obvious scenario for anyone who has ever driven, or anyone who thinks briefly about the physics involved: when you’re driving fast, the rain doesn’t hit your rear window. Out of the blue (or gray, in this case), my mouth spoke the words, “I wonder what’s the minimum speed I have to drive to keep the back window dry?” My wife immediately intuited that “it depends on the shape of the car”, by which she meant the angle of the rear window. This insight made the original question all the more interesting to me, because it gave me an equation to plot! Are you getting excited yet?
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Last Wednesday, we had a particularly ominous looking sunset, with the horizon lit by the sun, yet dark stormy clouds overhead. The contrast was too much to bear, so I took a few too many photographs. I never quite got the exact shot that I wanted with the sun, already over the horizon, illuminating the underside of the clouds, but I did get some photos worth sharing. What can I say, I’m a fan of atmospheric phenomena!
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Yesterday morning I had a video conference with Bangkok, as international men of mystery like myself do on Friday mornings. It was actually with my friend Jacob, who is there for a month on business and had his workday cancelled because of the heavy flooding Thailand is currently experiencing, so he was bored in his hotel suite and sent me an iMessage. When I initiated a FaceTime call with him, I realized as soon a I pressed the button to call him that there was no way it would work.
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I’ve been a fan of The Onion for a long time, so I was quite distressed to see that they’ve put up a paywall. Now, when you view more than five articles in thirty days, it pops up a box asking you to pay $2.95/month or $29.95/year for full access. My personal philosophy is that content should be monetized by advertisements and the minority of people that choose to use technology to block those ads just have to be accepted as a loss. With a little HTML investigation, I figured out which elements need to be hidden from the page to disable their fairly weak attempt at securing their content behind a paywall. If you have the popular AdBlock plugin (Firefox, Safari, Chrome) installed, you need only add two rules to your AdBlock settings.
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There’s been a bit of an online privacy storm lately over the fact that Facebook doesn’t remove all the cookies from your browser when you log off. Every three or four months, there’s a big “OMG!! Facebook is EVIL and breaching my privacy!” wave that runs over the online community before everyone forgets it and keeps using the service.
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Facebook’s genius has been to make it “cool” to “tell all your friends” what movies and products and politics you like, which is exactly the data advertisers are dying to get their hands on.

A few months ago, I placed an ad on Facebook, mainly as an experiment to satisfy my curiosity about how their advertising system works. It was a few days before the British royal wedding, and I had done up a silly little photoshopped image of the bride and groom with their faces swapped, so I decided to see how much traffic I could drive to that page. I told Facebook I was willing to spend up to $10 on the ad over three days (I ended up pulling the plug, curiosity quenched, after spending only $8). Then I got to select who the ad was presented to…and that’s when things got creepy.
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Theories about information flow are particularly fun when they arrive to your brain through the very mechanisms they are explaining. Recently several of my Facebook friends, a couple people I follow on Twitter, and two of my favorite podcasts started reporting on a new concept from Eli Pariser called The Filter Bubble. The general idea goes like this: as search engines and social media sites use smarter and smarter algorithms to better serve what they determine our needs to be, the less and less we are exposed to opposing viewpoints.
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A false dichotomy is a fallacious rhetorical device that provides an either/or choice in an attempt to force the listener to choose between the two options. The fallacy comes from the fact that the list of options are not really exhaustive, but limited in the speaker’s favor. The standard example is “You’re either with us or you’re against us.” A critical thinker will stop the speaker upon hearing a false dichotomy and say, “Wait a minute! Those aren’t the only two options!” But it works like a charm on a toddler.
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As my knowledge about social networking and online marketing has grown, I have attained a better grasp of how Facebook should be used, or at least how Facebook wants us to use it most effectively. The most important dichotomy to understand is that between Facebook accounts and Facebook pages. These have evolved over the years I’ve been using the most popular social networking site, and they will continue to evolve. Let’s look at the differences…
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