Kool Scatcat sent me this photo of actual crop circles.

Apparently, in parts of the US, crops are actually grown in circles to optimize irrigation. There is a single sprinkler in the center of each one.

UPDATE: Craig Kaplan wrote me the following note

Jim,

I wanted to pass on a couple of notes regarding crop circles…

First, I think that in the case of circular crops, it’s not that
there’s a big sprinkler in the middle, but that there’s a radial
sprinkler — a long line of sprinklers on a metal rod. The rod’s
on wheels and pivots around the centre of the circle, irrigating
a disc-shaped region. Given that the circles are about 1/4 mile
in diameter, I don’t think a big sprinkler in the middle would
do the job.

Second, I don’t know if this is on your list already, but in case
you haven’t seen it Andrew Glassner wrote a couple of columns
about crop circles in IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications. He
even designed a little programming language for describing crop
circles. Check this page for more information:

http://glassner.com/andrew/cg/cga/cga2004.htm

Boy, I sure sounded authoritative when I made that stuff up about the sprinkler in the middle, didn’t I? Don’t believe everything you read kids. The Glassner page is AWESOME, by the way. Check it out.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Linkydinks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.