After waking up this morning, I went upstairs and looked out the front window of the house where I live, seeing a puzzling sight. It had begun snowing, and I could see snow in the front walkways of both of my neighbors. But (except for a single rectangle about a meter wide) there was basically no snow in either the front walkway of the house where I live, nor in the sidewalk in front of the house (outside the fence). Here is what it looked like from the front door. Notice there is snow on the front walkway of my neighbor to the left, but none on my walkway.
Investigating further, I found another strange anomaly. In the area just in front of the house where I live, there was a single concrete rectangle that had snow; but otherwise the area was free of snow. The effect is shown below:
There is no reason why anyone would have shoveled the area in the bottom half of the photo above, as you can enter and exit the house without going through such an area. We see a "rectangle of precipitation" effect that is not explained by any structural feature of the house. There is nothing but open air above the area shown in the photo above, nothing that could explain why only one of the concrete rectangles is covered in snow.
The effect reminds me of what I have repeatedly seen and photographed, with the photos appearing in my post "When Raindrops Fall Non-Randomly: A Marvel of 'Precipitation Selectivity'" which you can read here. For example, On December 7, 2023 the effect appeared as below, during light snowfall. The precipitation seemed to wet only one of the concrete rectangles of the back lot.
The effect that I have observed very many times in the back lot (and which I have photographically documented in the post above) is that when it first starts to rain, at first only one of the concrete rectangles in the backyard will become wet, with all of the other rectangles remaining dry. Eventually when the rain picks up, the whole back lot will be wet. There are no structural features that explain this, and the whole area shown in the photo above is open to falling raindrops.
Part of the reason I take seriously the idea that water (or precipitation that is mainly water) may behave in a non-random manner (with a kind of selectivity) is that over the course of several years (while photographing water drops falling in front of me) I photographically documented an extremely strong effect of falling water drops behaving in a dramatically non-random manner, with very noticeable patterns arising and often persisting for hundreds of consecutive photos. For 700+ posts of mine documenting this effect, see my series of posts here, while continuing to press "Older Posts" at the bottom. To see the whole series in a way that allows finger-swiping through the whole series, use the link here.
