In the title, natural is in quotation marks because today’s cow is far from whatever cows were a few thousand years ago before we domesticated them. But at least the photo shows something that isn’t man-made. I can tell by its size that the gauge was made by one of the bigger, older cows. One with experience and a whole lot of savvy. You see, cows depend on rain to provide needed moisture for growing grass. So they place these gauges in the fields they expect to depend on for feed, and keep in mind the various amounts of rainfall in each of the fields. When the rainy season ends, they can mosey off to the promising fields without wasting time traveling to the ones that will be grass-deficient. And you thought they were just dumb old cows!
Wednesday, December 17
“Natural” rain gauge
In the title, natural is in quotation marks because today’s cow is far from whatever cows were a few thousand years ago before we domesticated them. But at least the photo shows something that isn’t man-made. I can tell by its size that the gauge was made by one of the bigger, older cows. One with experience and a whole lot of savvy. You see, cows depend on rain to provide needed moisture for growing grass. So they place these gauges in the fields they expect to depend on for feed, and keep in mind the various amounts of rainfall in each of the fields. When the rainy season ends, they can mosey off to the promising fields without wasting time traveling to the ones that will be grass-deficient. And you thought they were just dumb old cows!
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5 comments:
And designed with a concentric overflow trough to preserve the integrity of the gauge... such remarkable precision given the available material and molding technology.
And another thing — in olden times, when these gauges dried out, they provided inspiration to early mankind to invent the wheel! After, of course, they finished their duty as bowls for breakfast cereal.
Yuk! I think you have ruined my breakfast.
So all the species that have gone extinct must have done so because they weren't smart enough to make rain gauges, and then their grasslands became glaciers or desert and they died without realizing that the rainfall levels were changing. Interesting!
Wow! Such philosophising - looks like a global warming debate right here...
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