Hello Friday!

Today's freebie is a web site that will show you how to tie any kind of knot that you could ever want to tie. From the web site:

"Animated Knots by Grog is the web’s #1 site for learning how to tie knots. From Boating Knots, Fishing Knots and Climbing Knots to tying a tie, or even Surgical Knots — we’ve got it covered.

Follow along as ropes tie themselves, showing just the essential steps, so you can master a knot in no time. Jump into any category to get started. If you’re unsure where to begin, try starting with the Basics, our Knot of the Day, Grog’s Blog or check out every knot we’ve got!"

It's super awesome and easy to use and we're heading straight into the season where some decorative knots might be very useful. Have fun!

It's Friday and time for something free! Today, it's a great website for kids.

I'm not sure how many people know about the odd problem that YouTube had a while ago with kid's videos. It was a strange one. Mixed in with perfectly ordinary kid videos were bizarre Elsa/Spiderman/Joker/Etc videos with adult themes of self-harm, inappropriate toileting, strange pregnancy and sexual innuendo. YouTube has tried to slap down the offenders, but the videos are still popping up occasionally on the YouTube Kids feeds.

The feeds are auto-generated by an algorithm rather than curated by humans, so yeah, that's going to happen. Parents have to be super aware of what their kids are watching on YouTube Kids because it can get weird really fast when it moves to the next video on auto-play.

This site is the remedy to that. The Kid Should See This is an awesome site with all kinds of educational and fun videos curated by real humans.

You can hoover over any of the categories at the top and you will be treated to a drop down of a few videos in that category. Click on it and see a plethora of educational and fun videos like "Playing Piano Under A Sleeping Cat" in the music category.

Clicking on Random is also fun.

There are also curated collections by the staff. They include topics like Legos, The Human Body and Poop (but not the inappropriate kind as above).

Or just click on the first link you come to and follow the links below.

I watched "The Very Hungry Maggot" thinking that if I was going to get something that kids would like, it would be this. Yep, starts out with puppies as a sort of eye-bleach at the beginning and then you go to a lab dealing with the food-chain. We eat chicken, maggots eat our food waste and chickens eat maggots. Beautifully explained with squiggly, wriggly maggots.

The ads are small and unintrusive. Clicking on one, even by accident will not result in unintended consequences.

Give the site a try. Hand it to your kid on your tablet, laptop or even your phone. It's really cool.

Doing something a little different this beautiful sunny Friday! How about Fun Friday? Look at the pictures below. Think you can tell which of these people are real?

Go look. I'll wait here.

...

None of them are. Want to generate fake people of your own? Go to this link and hit your browser's refresh button for a new non-person every two seconds: This Person Does Not Exist

All of these 'people' are stitched together using Generative Adversarial Networks or GANs for short. It's AI - A type of a machine learning network. It kind of gives me the creeps, but it's also very cool.

Right now, it's very easy to see the bits that look like bad image alterations. Some are much easier than others. The guy with the disembodied hand on his shoulder is the perfect example of this, as is the woman with the orange hair. It's clear that the computers thought her hair was the color of the hat rim and thought the hand was an exposed part of his body. It's a color error.

Thing is, this network is learning what works and what doesn't, so it will improve with time without human intervention. It's rudimentary now. Imagine what it will be able to do in the future - Make entire videos without the need for any biological input?
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You can read about it at Wikipedia: