As everyone who listens to Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me knows, there is weird news every week. Here are a few that caught my attention recently, three nature-related and three technical.

This 17.5 pound Brazilian potato achieved its shape without direction from the gardeners. Human feet potatoes seem common enough on Google; this is just the latest. The couple who grew it are “a little bit scared” and “don’t plan to eat it.”

The fish of Walden Pond, a location near and dear to my heart, are being devastated by high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus that scientists say are likely due to generations of urinating swimmers. The article suggests more bathrooms, but you know, there are bathrooms. Swimmers are clearly making a decision. It was so beautiful, yet now it looks different to me.

A park crew in France has trained crows to pick up litter in exchange for food. Crows are pretty smart, so perhaps I should say “employed” instead of “trained.” I’m not sure how I feel about wild animals being semi-domesticated in this manner, but those park crows are probably eating a lot of human discards anyway. I hope people in that park don’t start littering more, thinking, Just let the crows take care of it. 

A Japanese firm called Warp Space is offering newlywed a chance to add their names to small cubes which will be launched into space from the ISS. Whap Space might be a better name for it. Just this month Neil deGrasse Tyson was on The Late Show explaining the threat of space debris; even a loose bolt is a serious problem. The ISS flies at a height of 254 miles, and GPS satellites at over 12,000 miles, so at least these cubes won’t threaten our ability to navigate to Home Depot.

When the ACLU used Rekognition, the new facial recognition software from Amazon, on the US Congress, it found 28 matches with mug shots of arrestees. Genders and ages seemed to be affected equally, but people of color were misidentified at a higher rate. This tells me that the IDs were indeed erroneous, since the vast majority of indicted officials I see on TV are white men. Amazon–every social media company–should hire software developers who score neutral on the Project Implicit test suite. Or if that’s too hard, maybe the software could somehow be subjected to the test before release.

I read about a Welsh fellow who is stuck in Dubai after the car rental company confiscated his passport, which it did after he amassed $47,000 in speeding fines in four hours. He was caught on camera 33 times, traveling at up to 150 mph. Most Americans feel those cameras that catch you speeding are, well, unAmerican. Maybe they aren’t used in Wales.

I seem to have missed the rental scooter revolution. Rental scooters seemed to appear in San Francisco, become pariahs, and disappear, all in short order. Now Bird scooters in LA are being thrown off balconies and into the ocean, defaced and set on fire. The Easy Chair column in the October Harper’s makes me think rental scooters should be avoided due to addiction. Don’t do it! You will make wrong decisions.