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)