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Carter Lake is an example of the border irregularities of the United States, being the only city in Iowa located west of the Missouri River. In March 1877, a flood redirected the course of the river 1.25 mi (2 km) to the southeast. The remnants of the old river course, called Saratoga Bend, became an oxbow lake, named Carter Lake. Soon after the formation of the lake, the site became a flourishing recreational area. It included "a boathouse at the foot of Locust street, hotels and club houses were numerous and the lake was the scene of many a pleasant rowing and fishing party."

In electronics, a jiffy is the period of an alternating current power cycle, 1/60 or 1/50 of a second in most mains power supplies.

In computing, a jiffy was originally the time between two ticks of the system timer interrupt. It is not an absolute time interval unit, since its duration depends on the clock interrupt frequency of the particular hardware platform.

Early microcomputer systems such as the Commodore 64 and many game consoles (which use televisions as a display device) commonly synchronize the system interrupt timer with the vertical frequency of the local television standard, either 59.94 Hz with NTSC systems, or 50.0 Hz with most PAL systems. Jiffy values for various Linux versions and platforms have typically varied between about 1 ms and 10 ms, with 10 ms reported as an increasingly common standard in the Jargon File.

Stratus VOS uses a jiffy of 1/65,536 second to express date and time (number of jiffies elapsed since 1 January 1980 00:00 Greenwich Mean Time). Stratus also defines the microJiffy, being 1/65,536 of a regular Jiffy.

The term "jiffy" is sometimes used in computer animation as a method of defining playback rate, with the delay interval between individual frames specified in 1/100th-of-a-second (10 ms) jiffies, particularly in Autodesk Animator .FLI sequences (one global frame frequency setting) and animated Compuserve .GIF images (each frame having an individually defined display time measured in 1/100 s).

The speed of light in a vacuum provides a convenient universal relationship between distance and time, so in physics (particularly in quantum physics) and often in chemistry, a jiffy is defined as the time taken for light to travel some specified distance. In astrophysics and quantum physics a jiffy is, as defined by Edward R. Harrison, the time it takes for light to travel one fermi, which is approximately the size of a nucleon. One fermi is 10−15 m, so a jiffy is about 3 × 10−24 seconds. It has also more informally been defined as "one light-foot", which is equal to approximately one nanosecond.

One author has used the word jiffy to denote the Planck time of about 5.4 × 10−44 seconds, which is the time it would take light to travel a Planck length if ordinary geometry were still relevant at that scale.

The pineapple is a herbaceous perennial, which grows to 1.0 to 1.5 m (3.3 to 4.9 ft) tall, although sometimes it can be taller. In appearance, the plant has a short, stocky stem with tough, waxy leaves. When creating its fruit, it usually produces up to 200 flowers, although some large-fruited cultivars can exceed this. Once it flowers, the individual fruits of the flowers join together to create a multiple fruit. After the first fruit is produced, side shoots (called 'suckers' by commercial growers) are produced in the leaf axils of the main stem. These may be removed for propagation, or left to produce additional fruits on the original plant. Commercially, suckers that appear around the base are cultivated. It has 30 or more long, narrow, fleshy, trough-shaped leaves with sharp spines along the margins that are 30 to 100 cm (1.0 to 3.3 ft) long, surrounding a thick stem. In the first year of growth, the axis lengthens and thickens, bearing numerous leaves in close spirals. After 12 to 20 months, the stem grows into a spike-like inflorescence up to 15 cm (6 in) long with over 100 spirally arranged, trimerous flowers, each subtended by a bract.