Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Wednesday Search Challenge (August 17, 2011): What is this thing in the middle of the street?

As you know by know, I'm a curious fellow.  When I see something that's puzzling, I often write the puzzlement down in my little notebook, and the look it up later when I have a spare moment.  Sometimes I'll take a picture of said obscuratum and work from that.  


I guess that makes me a high need for cognition personality type.  But you knew that already. 


So I'm walking down the middle of my street the other day when I spotted this: 




 It's in the middle of the street and is about 8 inches in diameter.   



Naturally, I'm curious. 


And since you're reading this blog, so are you.  We're all high NFC personalities.  


Today's search challenge:  What is this thing?  And why is there one in the middle of my street?  What does it do?? 


 (The only other clue I'll give you is that I'm now starting to see them everywhere.  They're pretty ubiquitous.  Now that you're attuned to them, you'll start seeing them too!)  


Search on!

3 comments:

  1. The "need to structure relevant situations in meaningful, integrated ways" is but part of the path of our evolution in the information age.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It looks like it's the marker for an anode used to prevent pipelines from corrosion. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathodic_protection#Pipelines and http://www.ulcrobotics.com/services/no-dig-anode-installation

    Search path:

    [anode street], which had results which got me to thinking about pipes, so I tried [anode path] and looked at the promising snippets.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Search [anode christy] and came up with several department of transportation docs.

    From the documents they appear to be connected with utilities and most common one mentioned was waterworks in conjunction to the Christy named on the cover.

    Looking over the diagrams and schematics made my head hurt and I still am not sure what they are for. I did try filtering by reading level but that didn't really help.

    ReplyDelete