It looks like ice, but when I went to pick it up it feels like gelatin. I was definitely not eating gelatin on the porch recently! It stretches out in a little trail covering about 10 feet. So what could it be?
Yes, unless you want to take a spill or get a nice surprise if you're walking barefoot.
"how this got spread out in a trail on the porch ..."
That's what initially led me to believe that it was Dyn-O-Gel, because there had been some stories a few years ago in the PA and Midwest area about people finding it on their property.
It's weird, when I look up Dyn-O-Gel today all I get are "conspiracy" websites or other questionable sources, and Dyn-O-Mat's website redirects to something totally different. But it *is* a real thing, I remember seeing stuff about it back when I was a sonar tech (we interacted with NOAA, so we were privy to weather mod info). So far all I can find about it today to prove that I'm not a wacko are these:
Dyn-O-Gel is almost exactly the same stuff as potting gel, except it also has an aluminum compound in it (probably either Aluminum Chloride or Aluminum Chlorohydrate, I don't know for sure).
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
The name is a misnomer. And a harmful one, because it interferes with understanding the process that is really occuring. What is really occurring is a search of a constrained program space. Let's say you want to be able to identify images of hot dogs . You begin with a plausible program for doing so, that is able to also search the space of nearby programs that might get better results on the problem. You then (in "supervised learning") provide scores that indicate how well one of these possible programs has done on solving the problem. After doing this for some time you settle upon a program that solves the problem "well enough." This is a great technique that can produce truly impressive results on a wide class of problems, such as identifying images of hot dogs. But notice that, except for the phrase in scare quotes, there is no "learning" in the description. Calling this "learning" is importing ideological baggage that just obscures what
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Dyn-O-Gel by Dyn-O-Mat. It's used for weather modification.
ReplyDeleteHowever, a similar water-absorbing polymer is used for potted plants, as well.
ReplyDeleteYes, you and Andy are correct. I had been potting plants: how this got spread out in a trail on the porch I don't know, but that's what it must be.
DeleteAlso I gotta pound that nail down, huh?
Delete"Also I gotta pound that nail down, huh?"
DeleteYes, unless you want to take a spill or get a nice surprise if you're walking barefoot.
"how this got spread out in a trail on the porch ..."
That's what initially led me to believe that it was Dyn-O-Gel, because there had been some stories a few years ago in the PA and Midwest area about people finding it on their property.
It's weird, when I look up Dyn-O-Gel today all I get are "conspiracy" websites or other questionable sources, and Dyn-O-Mat's website redirects to something totally different. But it *is* a real thing, I remember seeing stuff about it back when I was a sonar tech (we interacted with NOAA, so we were privy to weather mod info). So far all I can find about it today to prove that I'm not a wacko are these:
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/08/24/news_pf/Floridian/Is_his_head_in_the_cl.shtml
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5d.html
http://www.latimes.com/sns-hc-51701quirky2,0,3118795.photo
Dyn-O-Gel is almost exactly the same stuff as potting gel, except it also has an aluminum compound in it (probably either Aluminum Chloride or Aluminum Chlorohydrate, I don't know for sure).
Just out of curiosity, how did I become the object-identifying man? Was it the poo? It must have been the poo.
ReplyDelete