Comments on: Ad Check

By: GP

GP — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:52:31 +0000

Phsst, that’s like a 5 day beard for me :p

By: dy/dan » Blog Archive » I’d Like To Believe We Had Something To Do With This

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:24:14 +0000

[…] [previously] […]

By: gurgle

gurgle — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:10:25 +0000

Good point by anon above, although I think the beard is a reasonable 4 weeks growth. One other factor that other’s haven’t noticed is the ability to relax the ab muscles and let the stomach pop out – it can make you look a lot fatter than you actually are!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 02:25:38 +0000

Also, the four weeks seems suspect – look at the tattoos on the arms. Those take time to heal and it’s not recommended to tattoo too much skin at once. The beard too – but growing one like that in four weeks is doable, if your beard thrives.

By: Maria Droujkova

Maria Droujkova — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:19:03 +0000

There are two relevant reference. The first is a blog I love, called Photoshop Disasters, that collects distortions of this sort and other, well, Photoshop disasters: http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/ The kids I regularly email this stuff report developing a keener eye for broken ratios.

The second is TinEye, which you can use to search for similar images, though it does not find any in this case: http://tineye.com/ I use it to investigate Photoshop shenanigans.

By: Jim Duffy

Jim Duffy — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:55:20 +0000

Hi Dan,
I had students take the ad and copy it into geogebra. They could then measure what should be fixed (nose to navel, width between eyes) and get interesting ratios to work with. Thanks for the lesson in math and ethics at the same time. It makes the students think!
Jim

By: Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 03:47:41 +0000

Yeah, good words here. I posted the undistorted images. Or at least, the best I could undistort them.

By: Britt

Britt — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 03:04:32 +0000

A) I will have to agree with the stretching of the image as the deceit, at least the primary deceit.
B) I was trying to not over think it, but my 5th grade teacher brain was enjoying the challenge of an actionable lesson for a high school classroom. The only reasonable topic I could think of would be to encourage the discussion toward y-intercept, slope, or some other graphing concept that could be applied to compare the two pictures. I am pretty sure that if we found a couple of points on his body that shouldn’t change with weight loss (ear to mouth or waist to shoulder) and established the slope of that line, we would quickly find some inaccuracies between the two pictures.

But like I said – I hope I didn’t over think it. Thanks for the question. I’m working on demanding similar cognitive engagement for my 5th graders…it is a challenge (for me anyway).

By: Jimmy

Jimmy — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:51:25 +0000

How about that it is not “Free” to find out what his secret is, yet the advertisement is stressing the importance of the word “free” to susceptible customers believing that it won’t cost them anything. How that can be related to math, that will need further thought.

By: Kate

Kate — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:43:26 +0000

The math problem here may be found in the percent of change in the body proportions from picture one to picture two. Using photo editing programs such as iphoto students can take pictures and recreate the dimensions and change ratios.
Also, their are significantly more tattoos one the man in picture two. How many hours of tattooing…how long for healing, color fade…I am certainly not a tattoo expert but the color on picture one looks deeper than on picture two- where more work has been done…..wouldn’t the newer work be deeper colors?
The eyes are hard to see in photo 2 but the triangle dimensions from eyes to tip of the nose would not change- unless there is some tampering.