Support for WBUR comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design.

MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science.

Learn more at MathWorks.com.

Spice Lovers, are you ready to fill the fire this winter?

Heat up the coldest month for the year with new limited edition Extra Flaming Hot Walkers.

Bringing the heat to Britain's most loved Chris brand. Don't be a denier, own the fire.

Try new Extra Flaming Hot Walkers. And try the rest of our our range with extra flaming hot Doritos, Walker's Max, and What's It's Crunchy.

This is on point. I'm Megna Chakrabardi. I'm going to start with a question today. I'm not going to answer it immediately, but it provides a compelling sort of mental backdrop for the conversation that we're going to have.

So right now, which is 10 o'clock in the morning Eastern time on Monday, January 13th, that's when we first broadcast this show.

The question is, is the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles on fire?

All right, keep that in mind.

I don't know if you maybe have heard or seen some things about that already.

Now, we live in a world where the visual sense is the most dominant sense.

I mean, for sighted people, what our eyes taken is the most powerful confirmation of reality.

And that's why there are sayings like, you've got to see it to believe it.

Or in the social media age, a more common one is picture or it didn't happen, which is what people tend to say when

someone posts an extraordinary claim, give us a picture of the event, or we will not believe that

what you're saying is true. But of course, ever since the earliest daguerre types, photography

has also been a medium of visual manipulation.

Well, now, I will venture that with the latest smartphone technologies, you would be wise to be

skeptical of just about any photograph. And why? Well, let's take Google, for example.

Google's hugely popular line of pixel smartphones has a photo feature called Magic Editor.

...