Feedlot Alley

Feedlot Alley is the nickname of an area in Alberta, Canada, where more than 500,000 cattle and 180,000 hogs live. That's a lot of livestock.

Apparently, the area around Feedlot Alley has some of the highest rates of gastrointestinal illness in the entire province of Alberta. The theory is that the waste from such huge numbers of livestock contaminates the local water supply, making the humans in the area sick.

So here's how it breaks down:

The local humans sit down to eat bacon cheeseburgers washed down by tall glasses of water. Little do they know that their water is filled with microscopic bits of cow poo and pig pee. They innocently drink the water with the cow poo and pig pee, and they eat the ground cow topped with sliced pig. Then all that ground cow and sliced pig and cow poo and pig pee mixes up in the humans' stomachs, and about ten minutes later, all the humans go poo and pee it all back into a toilet. It's the circle of life.


She'll give you diarrhea without thinking twice.
Photo: ILIKEITSIMPLE via Flickr (CC)

Disused railway stations (Didcot, Newbury and Southampton Railway)

Disused railway stations (Didcot, Newbury and Southampton Railway) is a compilation of closed stations on a cross-country train line in England. There are 16 of these stations. Some of them have funny British names. Each has its own special history.

Railway stations are special places. People get on. People get off. People say goodbye. People say hello. People run away. People return home. People go to the bathroom. People read books. People take trains. People, take trains.

Take trains, people.

Much of the Didcot, Newbury and Southampton line is still intact.

Photo: Brianfit via Flickr (CC)

Out of Tune (band)

Out of Tune (band) is a Polish indie rock band. Their name is being ironic. At least I assume it is. I assume they are mostly in tune. Music that's out of tune is grating on the brain. No one really knows why. At least I don't think they do. There's something about human brains that was made to like certain combinations of rhythms and sounds, but not others.

There must be a purpose behind this, but hell if I know what it is. Hell if anyone does.


This man is out of tune.
Photo: Arty Smokes via Flickr (CC)

Split Mountain (Sierra Nevada)

Split Mountain (Sierra Nevada) is a 14,064-foot mountain in the Sierra Nevada range in California. It has twin summits. That's why people call it Split Mountain.

Sierra Nevada is also a beer. I don't really like it. But I do like beer in general.


Everything's blue and fake from the top of Split Mountain.
Photo: pellaea via Flickr (CC)

Jo-Ann Stores

Jo-Ann Stores is a retail chain that sells crafts and fabrics. It is based in Hudson, Ohio.

Wikipedia doesn't say who Jo-Ann is or was, but that's okay. I respect the store, because fabrics are important. Without them, nothing would be made out of anything.


Skin. The fabric of our lives.
Photo: angel_shark via Flickr (CC)

Louisiana House of Representatives

Louisiana House of Representatives is the Lower House in the Louisiana State Legislature. It convenes in Baton Rouge.

Baton Rouge is the answer to a trivia question that Cindy Brady can't answer on the Brady Bunch when she is a contestant on a kids' game show and she panics and freezes and just looks at the red light on the camera and Marsha watching on TV back home says "Baton Rouge, Cindy. Baton Rouge."

I always think of that when I hear Baton Rouge.

What do you think of when you hear Baton Rouge?


The Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge looks like a big penis.
Photo: jimmywayne via Flickr (CC)

Rómulo Gallegos Center for Latin American Studies

Rómulo Gallegos Center for Latin American Studies is a foundation of the Venezuelan government whose purpose is to promote Latin American culture, especially the work of Rómulo Gallegos. Rómulo Gallegos was a Venezuelan novelist and politician.

No relation to former Oakland A's second baseman Mike Gallego.


Mike Gallego.
Photo: ztil301 via Flickr (CC)

Harold Furth

Harold Furth was an Austrian-American physicist. In the late 1960s he "contributed some important theoretical work on resistive magnetohydrodynamics instabilities in a slightly resistive plasma."

He sounds like a real asshole.


What a bunch of bullshit.
Photo: Marvin (PA) via Flickr (CC)

Plettenberg

Plettenberg is a town in Germany. Germany is a country in Europe. Europe is a continent on Earth. Earth is a planet in the Solar System. The Solar System is a group of bodies orbiting a star in the Milky Way galaxy. Milk is a beverage that comes from a breast. A breast is more delicious on some animals than on others. But that's all in the eye of the beholder. For example, I like chicken breast, but a lion prefers zebra breast. It's nonsense to say that one animal's breast inherently tastes better than another's.

And that brings us back to Plettenberg, a town in Germany. Life is a round-trip journey.


Plettenberg is one-way.
Photo: Uwe.Koch via Flickr (CC)

Stillicidium

Stillicidium is water dripping from the eaves of a building. Or maybe it was just the term for water dripping from the eaves of the Etruscan temple. I don't know, the article's weird and very short. So is Danny Devito.


Some of the finest stillicidium I've ever seen.
Photo: Chiot's Run via Flickr (CC)

Charles Gray (actor)

Charles Gray (actor) was an English actor. He played a villain in a James Bond movie and was the narrator in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He went to school with Benny Hill. His name when he was born was Donald Marshall Gray, but he changed it. He first appeared on Broadway in 1961 in the musical Kean. His film breakthrough came in 1967 in the WWII murder mystery The Night of the Generals. Between 1968 and 1979, he was in more than 40 major film and television productions.

He died in 2000. Now he is made of ashes.


Close-up of Charles Gray's last name.
Photo: thodue via Flickr (CC)

Emma Carroll

Emma Carroll was the oldest person in Iowa for about nine months, starting on the day that 111-year-old Hazel Blecha died. Emma Carroll died on July 10, 2007 at the age of 112. She was quite wrinkly.

In 2004, at the age of 109, Emma became the oldest person to ride in a hot air balloon. It would have been more impressive if she'd become the oldest person to ride on a hang glider.


Everything wrinkles.
Photo: CirclesofLight via Flickr (CC)

Passive cooling

Passive cooling is technology that cools buildings without using power. It generally means the building doesn't use pumps or fans. Instead, other techniques are used to keep sun heat out and cold air in. Like orientating a building to take advantage of winter sun and avoid direct sunlight in the summer.

I am closer to a nerd than cool, but there are certain moments when I could be considered cool by some people. And I never use pumps or fans.


Passively cool.
Photo: salparadise666 via Flickr (CC)

Nathaniel Baldwin

Nathaniel Baldwin invented headphones. Isn't that weird? He invented headphones. I've never heard of him. What an important man. I wonder if he's related to Billy Baldwin.

Nathaniel Baldwin was also a supporter of the early Mormon fundamentalist movement.

I wonder if he invented headphones so he could listen to early Mormon fundamentalist musicians.


Mormon fundamentalists are allowed to have many headphones at the same time.
Photo: penmachine via Flickr (CC)

Nazir Jairazbhoy

Nazir Jairazbhoy was a professor of folk and classical music of South Asia at UCLA. Sadly, he died in June of 2009. But he was 82, so it's not as sad as it might be. Every man dies. Not every man really lives. William Wallace said that. Maybe not in real life, but he did in Braveheart.

I wonder if Nazir Jairazbhoy liked Braveheart.


Every man dies. Not every man poses for a photo with another man pretending to be William Wallace.
Photo: stuant63 via Flickr (CC)

Dublin University American Football Club

Dublin University American Football Club is an American football team at Trinity College In Dublin. It's a new team, established in 2008. They are the Thunderbolts.

Wikipedia says the Thunderbolts' head coach is Conor O'Shea, but I think Wikipedia actually had no idea who the head coach was so they just made up a stereotypically Irish-sounding name.


Thunderbolts are actually made out of lightning.
Photo: Paul Mayne via Flickr (CC)

Size functor

Size functor is some kind of math concept. The word 'functor' made me giggle.

This Wikipedia article is mind-bogglingly complicated. I think I have never read anything that made less sense to me in my life. It has more words I don't know than words I do.


It took decades, but finally his size functor was complete.
Photo: davidfullerdaniel via Flickr (CC)

Fermi's golden rule

Fermi's golden rule is a thing in quantum physics. Fermi was an Italian-American physicist who lived in the first half of the 20th century.

According to Wikipedia, Fermi's golden rule can be summed up like this:

"We consider the system to begin in an eigenstate of a given Hamiltonian H₀. We consider the effect of a (possibly time-dependent) perturbing Hamiltonian H'. If H' is time-independent, the system goes only into those states in the continuum that have the same energy as the initial state. If H' is oscillating as a function of time with an angular frequency ω, the transition is into states with energies that differ by from the energy of the initial state. In both cases, the one-to-many transition probability per unit of time from the state to a set of final states is given, to first order in the perturbation, by

where ρ is the density of final states (number of states per unit of energy) and is the matrix element (in bra-ket notation) of the perturbation H' between the final and initial states."

Jesus' golden rule was "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

I like Jesus' better.


On the other hand, Jesus doesn't have a lab named after him.
Photo: Michael Kappel via Flickr (CC)