The following is a phenomenon that I've noticed over the past 20 years that seems to have escaped any serious study, and one which I think ought to be brought to attention.

Have you ever noticed cows? I mean really noticed them. I've always looked at cows since I was a tyke. Have you ever noticed how sometimes cows spread out over a whole big pasture often all to be facing in the same direction? They don't seem to pay very much attention to each other, but they're aligned - polarized. It like the spins of ferric ions in a magnet. If you cool a piece of iron down to a very low temperature, it suddenly tunrns into a magnet because the thermal vibrations are overcome by the local spin-spin interactions.

So what's going on with the cows? Sometimes they're aligned and sometimes they're not. Sometimes there are too few cows to tell. I don't know what it means when they're sitting down, but when they are standing and aligned it always seems to be really nice weather that's going to stick around for a while. If there's a storm brewing, even if it isn't clear to you, it apparently disturbs the cows; they're not aligned.

I've been watching this for years, and the correlation seems remarkably good. Next time you want to know what kind of weather is coming, just look at cows.

I think they tend to sit down in fog, but then they sit down for other reasons that only the cows seem to know.