Please. Mr. Poe loves zucchini. pic.twitter.com/6JsyN2zVKJ

— Mr. William Henry Leonard Poe 🇺🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (@WadeJo8) August 8, 2023

Some people are celebration National Zucchini Day today, but the full proper title of the holiday is National Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor's Porch Day. August 8 is the peak of zucchini season, when you've already tried every recipe known to man to use up the zucchini from your garden, but every day you get more, and they are growing to enormous sizes. Yeah, you could just offer them to your neighbors, but they would say no thanks, we have plenty already, and that doesn't help you at all.

Gourd to death. pic.twitter.com/2JYZ6CoqHm

— Stan Kelly (@KartoonistKelly) August 8, 2023

The alternative is to just leave a box full of zucchini on their porch when no one is looking, and now it is their problem. And who is to blame for this?

I created this https://t.co/nfDgKeoc1z

— Tom_Roy_SAGAFTRA_actor_broadcaster (@TomRoyActor) August 8, 2023

The zucchini is so big this year, you may need a forklift for your sneaking.

Tomorrow is

Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbour’s Porch Day

Plan accordingly pic.twitter.com/XMSynl8BxQ

— Halifax ReTales (@HalifaxReTales) August 7, 2023

My husband and his grown-ass friends ding dong ditched a zucchini on their friend’s porch this weekend.

This behavior is why I married this man. pic.twitter.com/djdujdhIEi

— StabbityDoom (@StabbityDoom) August 7, 2023

Some people have already posted the "gifts" they have received.

It’s National Sneak Some Zucchini Into Your Neighbor’s Porch Day!

I’m in for Brady, so our photographer Dorothy brought me a gift to celebrate the day in style! 😂 pic.twitter.com/L9MZ2F4Bfg

— Everett Lau (@elau_weather) August 8, 2023

But seriously, if you have more zucchini than you can eat, it can be frozen, or pickled, but the best way to get rid of it is to take it to your local food bank. Food banks often have no way to store fresh food, but check their operating hours, and give them a call. They might be able to distribute all your extra garden produce that very day!

I thought Kentucky had some weird place names (Tyewhoppety, Big Beaver Lick, Booger Branch), but those are nothing compared to the place names around the world that are rude, crude, and socially unacceptable in other languages. Fan y Big makes plenty of sense in Welsh, but is hilarious to those who speak British English, and induces a small giggle in those who speak American English. Rottenegg and Kilmacow are funny whichever type of English you know, but both make perfect sense in their local languages. Scratchy Bottom is just plain English, and a wonderful place to proclaim you are from. It sounds like a fungal problem. Rob Watts of RobWords takes us on a tour of places that might surprise or embarrass you. Yeah, I know, there are even naughtier place names that you can think of, but he never said these are the worst. In fact, he held back on explaining the very rudest place names. There's a skippable ad from about 3:20 to 4:30.  -via Laughing Squid

A shark that glows in the dark? That's just swell! The swell shark (Cephaloscyllium ventriosum) got that name because of its odd defense method. It ingests a lot of water in a hurry to swell its body up, making it too big and round for predators to eat! But the way these fish recognize each other is even weirder. They harness bioluminescence to give themselves a pattern of green glowing spots, which neither humans nor other fish can see. But the swell shark can see and recognize other swell sharks because they developed a special yellow lens in their eyes. The Tennessee Aquarium has swell sharks, and can see their glow by shining blue light on them and looking through yellow glasses, which mimic the way the sharks see. Or they can just shine a blacklight on the sharks.

The Tennessee Aquarium recently had a breakthrough in that they hatched a swell shark from an egg, the first captive facility to do so. The baby shark already has its own green glowing dots. Read about the swell shark and see videos of its bioluminescence at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Tennessee Aquarium)

Stack Rock is a small, rocky island in the Milford Haven Waterway, Pembrokeshire, Wales. Its strategic location prompted Thomas Cromwell to consider building a fort on the island in 1539. That didn't happen for another 300 years, but Stack Rock Fort was built in 1850 and completed in 1852. It was built to be a defense against the French forces of Napoleon III. The fort was decommissioned in 1929, and has been sitting abandoned for almost 100 years. Nature has invaded, and the moss, vegetation, and wildlife make the fort look as if it really were built 500 years ago.

In 2021, a community interest group named Anoniiem purchased the island. The company aspires to preserve the fort as a "living ruin" and open it to the public. They invited a group of photographers to visit the island and take pictures of the inside. Photographer Steve Liddiard, who took the above video, was among them. Liddiard shared his photographs and his impressions of Stack Rock Fort with the BBC, and you can see them as well.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Gina Reneé Finnesen)

We don't know what bumps and trauma this tree went through as it grew, but the result is a cute bunny rabbit. Pareidolia is the human tendency to see faces in things that aren't faces. We are programmed to respond to facial expressions because they convey important information. So anything we see with two eyes tends to look like a face. Bonus if there's a line for a mouth. But pareidolia is not limited to faces- it pertains to any familiar shape we can recognize in something that's not that at all, like the blobs in a pet's fur coloring that look like a heart or brand logo. Even sprouting plants can have a recognizable shape, like a mother Groot instructing her Baby Groot.

(Image credit: Kirsty Louise)    

A Facebook group called Things With Faces collects examples to share. See a roundup of 30 of their best images ranked at Bored Panda.

Cities, and even small towns, would be much more user-friendly if we didn't have all this traffic. Cars take up a lot of room, both in the roads we drive on and in the parking lots where we store them. They are dangerous to pedestrians and to each other, and are the main reason we don't walk everywhere and get to know our neighbors. They are also noisy and pollute the air. But we have become so dependent on our cars, how could we ever change this?

Zermatt, in Switzerland, didn't have to change hearts and minds, because the Alpine village never had cars to start with. Now that they have roads, they've decided they don't want gasoline-powered vehicles on their streets. Small, slow, electric vehicles are allowed, but are greatly restricted for use as taxis and for deliveries. And all of Zermatt's vehicles are custom built locally by a ten-man crew! Tom Scott shows us how it's done in a town that knows what it wants.

Big Ben is a word search game. You start off with all the letters it takes to spell out the current time, old fashioned style (hence, Big Ben). Then they scramble in some lesser-used letters to make a complete grid of 49 letters. Find as many words as you can by connecting adjacent letters in any direction, even several directions in a word. You rack up points by finding words, and more points by finding longer words. I got 36 points with my first word in the game pictured above! Yes, I can already see "just," "who," and "sex." When you complete a word, all those letters fall off and change the grid. There's no time limit; you end the game when you run out of options, or vowels. As a beginner, I just ran through words as I saw them, but I can see someone calculating how other letters will fall to maximize their score. Either way, it's a fun little distraction for a break in the midst of doing real work.  -via Everlasting Blort

Seventy-eight years ago today, on August 6, 1945, the US military dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima from the B-29 Superfortress named Enola Gay. Nagasaki was bombed three days later by another atomic weapon dropped from a Superfortress named Bockscar.

The powerful B-29 bomber had been in the works since 1933, when American war planners contemplated a possible conflict with the Japanese Empire. No bomber at the time could fly far enough to attack Japan. Existing bombers had a range of 650 miles with a payload of 2,000 pounds. Boeing and Martin both went to work to design a plane with a much longer range. Although several were designed, bigger planes had a problem in that they couldn't even fly 200 miles per hour, not nearly fast enough to carry out a bombing mission. Douglas and Sikorsky also got involved, but the funding for a superbomber ran out in 1938. However, Boeing believed in the research they had already done, and continued development at the company's own expense.

When war broke out in Europe, funding was restored and four aircraft companies: Consolidated Aircraft Company, Lockheed, Douglas, and Boeing were recruited to commence developing a plane that could deliver 2,000 pounds of bombs 5,333 miles away at 400 miles per hour. Boeing had a head start, since they never stopped their program. The military was so impressed with Boeing's B-29 design that they ordered it in 1940, even before the prototype was ready, and before the US was attacked by Japan. Read about the bomber program that began in 1933 and the many designs that were tried before the B-29 Superfortress at Military History Now. -via Strange Company

What's it like to get a doctoral degree? Or, to be more precise, what's it like to try to get a doctoral degree? Mianzhi Wang, a graduate of a doctoral program in electrical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, created a text-base simulation game that shows you. Make good choices, but be aware that your time and money are finite resources that must be used prudently.

It is not a Kobayashi Maru game, which was my expectation. You can definitely win and I did so on my first try.

The game is designed to reflect the norms of STEM fields. It would be interesting to try a similar game for the humanities, which would, of course, end in poverty even if successful.

-via Book of Joe

(Image credit: Ehsan Kamali)

The critically endangered Asiatic cheetah once ranged across many nations from the Arabian peninsula to South Asia. The subspecies Acinonyx jubatus venaticus diverged from African cheetahs somewhere between between 32,000 and 67,000 years ago, according to genetic studies. Rulers in Asia once captured cheetahs to use them as swift hunting dogs. But the cheetah population declined drastically in the 20th century due to habitat loss, hunting, lack of prey, and traffic accidents. The only population of Asiatic cheetahs left in the wild are in Iran, where there are thought to be only nine males and three females left as of last year. 

(Image credit: Azadeh Torkaman)

Cheetahs are notoriously hard to breed in captivity. Attempts to breed the Asiatic cheetah have seen dismal results. The only Asiatic cheetahs born in captivity were three cubs delivered via cesarian section in Tehran, Iran, in 2022. The mother (named Iran) had been rescued from a trafficking situation and was raised in captivity. Iran rejected the cubs, most likely due to the lack of a birth experience, and the cubs had to be hand-fed. Two of the cubs died within their first few weeks. The third, named Pirouz (pictured above) became a symbol of national pride for Iran. However, Pirouz died of kidney failure at the age of ten months.

Reintroducing Cheetahs to India

One response to the drastic decline in Asiatic cheetahs is a program to reintroduce cheetahs to India, where they declared wiped out in the 1950s. Twenty cheetahs from Namibia and South Africa were relocated to Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh over the past year. Since March of 2023, six of the original cheetahs and three cubs have died. None of those cheetahs died by human hands, but one succumbed to malnutrition. Prey animals in the park have declined since the cheetah program was proposed. The others died of infections that may have stemmed from poor species management, and have to do with the fact that African cheetahs are genetically and environmentally different from Asiatic cheetahs. These cheetahs grew in their winter coats just as the rainy season began in India, leading to fungal and parasitic infections taking hold around wounds and tracking collars. Cheetah experts in Namibia and South Africa blame inexperienced veterinarians and project mismanagement. They are offering advice, as they know how fragile cheetah populations can be.  

The cheetah reintroduction program in India has had deleterious effects on the human population, too. The Sahariya people who lived in the forests of Kuno before it became a national park depended on harvesting chir, an expensive fragrant resin, from the forest's salai trees. The Sahariya villagers were relocated from the area that became the national park due to a program to reintroduce the Asiatic lion, which never came to fruition. The villagers kept returning to the forest to harvest chir, but the cheetah reintroduction program has made large swatches of the park completely inaccessible to them.     

The letter X is altogether unnecessary in phonics, and rarely does a word begin with it. But we keep it around because we like it. We end a lot of words with X, and when it's "ex," we begin words with it all the time. It's used to indicate something is wrong in schoolwork. People who can't write their names use an X as a signature. Elon Musk uses it for everything. We leverage its meaning as an unknown with titles such as The X-Files and X-Men and phrases such as "X factor." It's the mathematical use of X for an unknown that lends intrigue to the letter. But how did X become the algebraic symbol for the unknown?

There are several theories for this use of X. Civilizations developed mathematics, geometry, and algebra used different stand-in words for the unknown. Multiple translations may have led the Arabic al-shayun, which means "something," to become an X. These translation stories take different paths. Or it could have been a good supply of the letter X at a printing firm. Read about the different stories of how we got the mathematical X at The Conversation. -via Smithsonian

(Image credit: Lisa Williams)

The US government owns a lot of land, and a lot of buildings. Some are grand federal buildings that house offices and crucial services. Others are just there on federal land, some being used for government business, others not so much. And many are miscellaneous buildings that were unclaimed, abandoned, or taken for taxes owed. Estimates of the number of those buildings range between 120,000 and 400,000, but pinning that down to a more accurate number is difficult, if not impossible. The problem is that those properties are managed by widely different agencies, from five branches of the military to the National Park Service to obscure agencies we don't even know about. Efforts to consolidate the information from all those agencies is like trying to herd cats. Half as Interesting explains why the question of just how many buildings the federal government owns will probably never be answered. The last minute of this video is an ad. -via Digg

The Pentagon has 17.5 miles of corridors and 6.5 million square feet of office space. Those many walls feature tons of photographs and artworks of military subjects produced by military personnel. A painting that can be found on the fifth floor, 10th corridor, D ring, went viral on X a few weeks ago. The chosen subject of this painting brought up profound memories shared by veterans.

The discarded magazine represents the alluring but ultimately shallow representations of the recruiter who convinces the individual to participate in collective debasement.

— B. A. Friedman (@BA_Friedman) June 22, 2023

The painting is titled "Hide Your Head in the Sand." The artist is Harley Copic, an aviation artist with more than 50 paintings hanging in the Pentagon, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and the Air Force Museum. The Porta-John depicted stood at Tallil Air Base in Iraq in April 2003.

Every enlistee in all branches of the US military is very aware of the vast gap between everyday warriors and the officer class, but all who have been deployed over the last 30-something years have used such facilities. Copic's iconic rendition is the symbol that brings service members and officers together. 

Within a forward-deployed Porta-John’s steamy confines, the scalding stillness of which can make an exterior 125-degree Iraq afternoon feel, at least momentarily upon exiting, like a fall evening in Montana, rank counts for nothing.

The irony is that this painting is in the Pentagon, among the hallowed halls that most enlisted members rarely penetrate. If prints were available, they would sell better than Copic's other artworks, and then be respectfully framed and displayed in veterans' bathrooms across the nation. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: B. A. Friedman)

The Device Orchestra (previously at Neatorama) has gone wireless. Well, I would suppose that electric toothbrushes are already wireless (mine is) and the only other gadget participating in this song is a credit card reader, but it now runs on batteries. In this video, the trio takes on the classic song "Thunderstruck" by AC/DC. What I want to know is how this guy gets those googly eyes to stay on the toothbrushes when they are vibrating, I mean, rockin' so hard.  

We've heard versions of "Thunderstruck" played on cellos, on the Korean gayageum, on the Chinese guzheng, and sung by a baby. You can even do a folk dance to it. I'm kind of enamored with the Finnish bluegrass version. You could say it's a universal song. -via Geeks are Sexy

The word "dinosaur" was coined in 1840, and it wasn't long before the general public was fascinated by the extinct creatures. This popularity was mainly the work of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, an artist and naturalist who sculpted dinosaurs for the Crystal Palace dinosaur display in London in 1851. In 1868, Hawkins was commissioned to make more dinosaurs for the proposed Paleozoic Museum in New York City. Hawkins set up a workshop in new York and went to work, which included new research from Drexel University on the latest fossil discoveries.

But before the Paleozoic Museum was ready for the public, political reorganization led to a new board of directors for Central Park. Hawkins was fired, and was never paid for the work he had done. Then in 1871, an order went out for the "old barn, shed, and structures at that place" (meaning Central Park) to be removed. Instead of just being removed, Hawkins' workshop was destroyed, along with all his dinosaur models, smashed to smithereens. The remains were reportedly either buried or dumped into the pond at the park. For 150 years, the destruction of the dinosaur models was blamed on Boss Tweed, the corrupt politician who controlled New York City. At least that's you'd think by reading the sensational newspaper stories of the time. But it wasn't Tweed who gave the orders to get rid of the museum. Read the real story of the short-lived Paleozoic Museum at Atlas Obscura.  -via Strange Company