While most of America only recognizes Shrove Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, celebrations of Carnival have been going on since Epiphany (January 6) in many parts of the world. That includes the traditional king cake, once called three kings cake for the Magi that visited baby Jesus on Epiphany. The cake itself was repurposed from a Roman Saturnalia tradition. The most common (and easiest) way to make a king cake in America is to make cinnamon rolls, but instead of cutting the roll, you twist it into a ring and bake it, then cover with purple, green, and gold sugar or icing. You might also put a small plastic baby inside the dough. But other countries have different traditional recipes.

France has cakes called galette and gâteau des rois, Portugal enjoys bolo-rei, Mexico has rosca de reyes, and Germany indulges in dreikönigskuchen, among other versions of king cake. They use different recipes, but they all have some things in common- they are either circular or decorated to represent a crown, and most of them have a surprise hidden inside. Read about the traditional king cakes of the world at Atlas Obscura.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, is known today as Ada Lovelace. She wrote the world's first computer program in 1842, for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a theoretical computer that was never built, but would have worked with Lovelace's programming.

Lovelace was gifted, both genetically and financially, as the daughter of Lord Byron. But her education differed from that of a privileged son born at the time. She was tutored at home in math, science, and logic, which was unusual for girls, but also in art, needlework, music, and languages, as would be expected. This combination of studies in widespread fields contributed to Lovelace's analytical thinking. For example, she saw that the punch cards used in weaving patterns for fabric would be a logical framework for mathematical commands, and that numbers could be converted into musical notes. Read how Lovelace distilled what she learned in disparate fields and how they contributed to her development of computer programming at Gizmodo. While reading, writing, and math are fundamental basics, there's always value in adding the humanities and other subjects.

(Image credit: Antoine Claudet)

We love watching Japanese zoos conduct their emergency drills with dangerous animals portrayed by an zookeeper in an animal costume. The latest is from Hitachi City Kamine Zoo, where the practice scenario is a bear that escapes when an earthquake breaks the glass in the display enclosure. It made no difference that this bear was an adorable teddy bear in a fairly good mascot costume, unlike some of the more ridiculous getups from previous drills. This drill involved not only zoo employees, but the local police, fire department, and the city's "pest damage prevention team." (Now if only US towns had such an agency...) The bear was first blocked in place by vehicles and nets, and then was shot with a tranquilizer dart, which we assume was as fake as the bear.

The drill ended in success, and we can imagine that it was followed by bear hugs all around.  -via Boing Boing

If playing Wordle once a day isn't enough for you, you need to try Clickword. It's sort of like a Scrabble game that you can play by yourself. You'll start with a grid that has a few letters on it (orange), and three letters you can place anywhere (blue) -and you have to place them all before you get new letters. When three or more letters form a word vertically or horizontally, they disappear! The game is over when you've placed 60 letters. Like Scrabble, points are based on the letter value. You might be going for a long word, but as soon as three letters that make a word from their dictionary show up, it's gone. On the other hand, there is value in clearing spaces for new words.  

I don't know why the actual game that compares you to other players is limited to once a day; but you can play practice games, which will give you a score. Careful, if you like word games, this could become addictive. -via Metafilter

Nature and fluid dynamics have their own way of doing things, and that's why rivers and streams left to their own devices will change over time. But those changes interfere with human settlements and commerce, so various aspects of the Mississippi River have been engineered one way or another ever since the US was established. This video from Half as Interesting tells us about the time riverboat captain Henry Miller Shreve arranged for a channel to be cut through a particularly difficult bend in the river to make navigation easier. But that cut changed the river's eventual direction so much that authorities added the Old River Control Structure to keep Old Man River from dumping all its water into the Atchafalaya River. The video is only 4:18; the rest is an ad.

However, several Louisiana commenters tell us that the tendency of the Mississippi to spill into the  Atchafalaya was actually due to the clearing of the Great Raft, a 150-mile logjam in the Atchafalaya and Red River that had been there for a few thousand years and was responsible for the bayous. Who cleared that logjam? Why, it was Henry Miller Shreve, who just couldn't keep his hands off the waterways. Yes, Shreveport was named after him, since removing the raft made the Red River navigable. The Great Raft story would make a fascinating video. -via Digg

Every real life love story has a beginning of how we met, and an ending, meaning where we are now, but the important part is when you realize that this is the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. Gifts and memorable dates are nice, but when you hear about that moment, it's usually when your significant other shows their kindness. Sometimes it's putting in effort to make your life easier. Or maybe going out of their way to support you or a family member through an illness. Or even helping strangers in their time of need. These things aren't usually romantic, but it gives you a glimpse into their character.

The question was posed on the subreddit Ask Women: What's the moment with your partner that confirmed that you're gonna spend your life with them? The stories that came out will brighten your day, and maybe raise your standards for finding a partner. You can read an extensive list of the best of them at Bored Panda.  

(Image credit: yue)

The case of Joseph Samuel stands out among Australian executions of the 19th century. Samuel was an Englishman, or rather an English boy, sent to a penal settlement at Sydney Cove for a crime committed in 1795 when he was 14 years old. But he was a man in Australia, and continued to commit crimes at the colony, where security was pretty lax due to authorities with the mindset of "Where can they go?"

After being convicted of the brutal murder of a policeman, Samuel was led to the gallows. Yet despite rope inspections, the hanging failed over and over again. Was it divine intervention after Samuel's last minute prayers? Was it a trick arranged ahead of time? Samuel had already tried a last minute stunt to deflect blame for the crime. What should be the legal remedy in such a case? Read about the crimes of Joseph Samuels, the mysteriously botched execution, and what ultimately became of him at Amusing Planet.  

(Image credit: Joseph Lycett)

Carnival season has been going on for a while, and will culminate this coming Tuesday on Mardi Gras. When Americans think of Mardi Gras, they think of New Orleans. While the Big Easy goes all out, it is by no means the only place to catch a great Mardi Gras parade. If you want to avoid the crowds and the expense of New Orleans, or if you're looking for a more family friendly celebration, you may want to catch two days of non-stop parades in Mobile, Alabama, a city that's been celebrating Mardi Gras for 320 years. In Mobile, the parade floats throw out Moon Pies as well as the tradition beads.  

Lake Charles, Louisiana, has a Mardi Gras Children’s Day on the Sunday before Mardi Gras, in addition to the daily parades. St. Tammany Parish has two boat parades and several dog parades. The towns of Lafourche Parish collaborate to stage more than two dozen parades. Read about these unique Mardi Gras celebrations in places that are not New Orleans at Smithsonian.  

(Image credit: Unskinny Boppy)

So many video game movies follow the story in the game. This one is based on a true story about the game. Tetris follows the work of Henk Rogers (played by Taron Egerton), the Dutch video game designer who pursued the rights to Tetris for the Gameboy from the Soviet Union as the USSR itself was in the process of falling apart. From all accounts, Soviet officials did not understand the concept of intellectual property rights, nor did they see the game's potential. Alexey Pajitnov invented the game in 1984, but did not receive royalties for it until he left Russia in 1991 and founded the Tetris Company with Rogers in 1996.

The history of the rights to Tetris is much more complicated than one movie could possibly illustrate, but this chapter sure looks exciting. Tetris will premiere March 31 on Apple TV+.  -via reddit

If you DO want to see a Tetris movie that involves gameplay AND Soviet history, we've already got that. It's a musical, too!

If you'd like to spend a few minutes or a week exploring the universe, check out NASA's Eyes. The website has a menu of interactive places to go and missions to follow. In the solar system, you can look at each planet individually and pull up information about that planet, or change the plane of orbits, zoom in and out, or pick a story from the left side to open. You can take a closer look at earth, or explore exoplanets in the same interactive manner. You can even land on Mars along with the Mars Perseverence rover mission.

From any point in your journey, you can suddenly switch gears and try something else. Every step of the way, you'll be able to access information about what you are looking at. It would take months to explore all the information made available to use in these apps. Pull up the menu to begin here.  -via Boing Boing

Robots can be scary, robot spiders are always scary, and they fly now. The University of Tokyo's robotics department has developed a terrifying and impressive robot that walks on four extended legs and flies, too. They call it SPIDAR, which is a tortured acronym for "SPherIcally vectorable and Distributed rotors assisted Air-ground amphibious quadruped Robot." It probably doesn't work any better in Japanese. The word "amphibious" usually means maneuvering in both land and water, but in this case they apparently mean both land and air. The challenge of this robot was to make it powerful enough to walk and fly while keeping the weight low enough for air travel. SPIDAR uses 16 thrusters to fly, and to assist the small servo motors used for walking. This is a prototype that's not all that efficient, and it's extremely loud. But it accomplished its purpose, and will no doubt be refined to make it actually threatening.

Edgar Allan Poe's haunting short story "The Black Cat" was first published in The Saturday Evening Post in August of 1843. It concerns a man who abuses his one-eyed black cat, and in so doing manages to kill his wife. He tries to cover up the murder by hiding her body in the wall of the cellar, closing up the wall before the police arrive. But the cat manages to get revenge. You can read the entire story online.

"The Black Cat" is fiction, but Poe took inspiration from real events. It just so happened that the year before, a sensational story about a woman's remains found plastered into a cellar wall was syndicated in newspapers across the the country. Poe's account expands upon the crime, and adds the twist of the cat, but the bones of the story are there in a real life report from Connecticut. Tales immediately grew up around the true crime, and were even published, many of which have since been debunked. Read what we know and what has never been discovered about the case that inspired Poe's terrifying tale at CrimeReads. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Byam Shaw)

The chess piece above is the bishop. Some sets have a cleft in the bishop and others don't. The classic Staunton chess set has the cleft. Redditor BroodyDoggo asked what it is for in the AnarchyChess subreddit. The answers they got were priceless.

Keep doritos in them for a midgame snack. A rook can be used to hold very small amount of salsa.
insert a coin there to power up your bishop
To use as a whistle when the opponent breaks rules
It's for holding the card you can apply to a bishop for bonusses
It's obviously the mouth
If you want to give your date (the chess term for "opponent") your number/note after a sexy match.
It’s a scar from a previous game
Aerodynamics, for when the bishop “Whooshes” across the board
Bottle opener

But the real answer is that it is made to resemble a Catholic bishop's mitre, a headress which has a front and back separated by a cleft. That's when we found out that more people than you'd suspect had never associated the bishop in a chess set with the church hierarchy. As a practical matter, the cleft makes it easier to distinguish the bishop from a pawn.

However, if we go further back into chess history, we find that the piece only became known as the bishop when the game spread to European cultures in the Middle Ages, and it got its name because it looked like a mitre to people familiar with bishops. Before that, it was the elephant, and indeed is still called the elephant in many countries. The Middle Eastern chess sets of the time were highly stylized, and the elephant was not a recognizable shape to Europeans. In some countries, this piece is called the camel. Now you know.

(Image credit: MichaelMaggs)

Flaco, the escaped Central Park Zoo Eurasian eagle-owl, with a rat shortly after catching it this past weekend.

* Long exposure night-time photo taken under ambient light with a telephoto lens. Only a small dark silhouette to the naked eye!#birds #birdwatching #nature #birdcpp pic.twitter.com/7Ug1aZUK1u

— David Lei (@davidlei) February 14, 2023

On February 2, a Eurasian eagle owl named Flaco escaped from the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan after someone cut into his wire enclosure. The owl was spotted and tracked by zoo staff, but every time they got close, he flew away. Over the next two weeks, Flaco was seen and photographed numerous times but refused to be approached. He has become the most elusive celebrity in the city, but doesn't mind the paparazzi as long as they don't get close enough to touch.

However, Flaco had been at the zoo since 2010, arriving at less than a year old, and zoo officials worried that he wouldn't be able to fend for himself.   

Flaco's many fans were very heartened this past weekend to see that Flaco procured a rat, which indicates that he is learning to hunt and might be able to survive on his own.

Shortly before Flaco the Eurasian Eagle-Owl caught a rat, he was playing shallow right field—on the Heckscher Fields of Central Park on Saturday night. What a thrill to see Flaco adapt so quickly to living in the wild! pic.twitter.com/Gnrlc0vGHM

— Manhattan Bird Alert (@BirdCentralPark) February 12, 2023

The Twitter account Manhattan Bird Alert is keeping up with Flaco's daily adventures, and also gives us plenty of other city birds to watch. You can also see many pictures of Flaco under his Twitter hashtag.

In grade school, we learned that living things are made up of cells, which are powered by mitochondria, and that plants cells have a cell wall. We learned to label those things, and the next year we learned it all over again, which was pretty much all the biology we got before high school. Unless you were lucky and had a couple of days of sex education.  

But cells are way more complex than that. The way a cell does its job involves proteins that form amino acids that form structures, machines, and messenger compounds that are more complex than most of us could ever imagine. To make that into something understandable, Kurzgesagt uses language as a metaphor for the basic inner workings of a cell. From an alphabet of 26 letters comes the works of Shakespeare, although building those works requires some amazing things to happen. -via Digg