Fun Friday Resources

Here are two fun Google experiments to play with.

LIFE TAGS takes over 4 million photographs from the old LIFE magazine and uses machine intelligence to tag them, allowing you to find those images. Yes, you have Google search, but LIFE chronicled 20th-century America in ways that you may want to drill into.

Results are serendipitous and not always on the nose, but for those of us who are fans of ACCIDENT, they can be useful.

A Patterdale terrier

For example, a search for dale provides photos of Airedale and Patterdale terriers, the latter of which I had no idea existed.

In a search for labyrinth, only about half the photos are actually of labyrinths; the rest are "labyrinthine," perhaps.

It's also a great TASK AVOIDANCE strategy to follow the category links.  You never know what you might stumble across.

Our other resource today is ART PALETTE.  This one is pretty amazing: it analyzes the zillions of images through color and presents you with an array of art that matches your choices.

You can start by monkeying with the three colors at the top of the screen, or you can upload an image.

And within that image you can move five little buttons around to choose the colors you want matched.  Try that with a selfie, and suddenly you'll see how many colors are involved in your "flesh tone."

If we take my author photo on the back of the book, here are the resulting images.

Again, just letting the machine do the thinking and clicking on Surprise Me is worth a few minutes of unexpected delight.

Try this: click on Surprise Me, then click on one of the five colors up top and change it.  Try moving one of them to a very bright blue.  Take all the colors and move them down towards black — or up toward white.

Most of the images are copy-protected, so downloading them and using them yourself is problematic.  Not impossible, mind you, but problematic in every sense. Your mileage may vary.