What is the purpose of this ridiculously narrow fence?

perhaps they put in one post and then the second was placed. So really it is a repost.

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Someone has not read Flatland

You win.

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Hey, good news! New movie from Christopher Guest coming!

a cage for a baby faraday?

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A typo in the specification. The fence’s intended 75m span was inadvertently written down as 75mm, probably because too much caffeine. This kind of error is known as the “Stonehenge Effect”, after the Spinal Tap production of the same name.

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Not allowed to guess it’s used for a gate, eh?

Let me take a crack. The property owner was having a dispute with a neighbor, maybe the HOA got involved, it was a particularly acrimonious pissing contest, and during this dispute, the owner was ordered, on pain of lawsuit, fines, etc., to build a fence.

And this was the result. “HERE’S YOUR FUCKING FENCE, HOPE YOU LIKE IT!”

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A real estate contract required the presence of a fence?

It’s for stopping this one elf. Seriously, that guy is such a dick.

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Say you’ve built your house - or a developer built your house and a bunch of other houses - in a place that was once a forest. It was a forest for a long time, long before there was a town to put a development in, or a state, or even a country…in fact, the forest had been there so long that the people who were here first knew not to settle in it or camp near it, because there were certain things in the forest that had very odd ways of being and of moving through the world. Also of…feeding. And though most of these things faded away as the forest shrank and was encroached upon on all sides by roads, houses, and shopping malls, not all of them did. And a very few of them - the oldest and oddest among them, with the strangest ways of being and moving - pretty much stayed where they were, as the excavators hauled the felled trees out, and the trucks brought in the concrete for the basements and the wood for the walls and roofs. Fortunately for the current residents of this patch of former forest, not everyone has forgotten what used to live here, or what still remains and expresses itself in strange geometries on certain nights of the year. More fortunate, still, is the particular knowledge kept by one old huntsman-turned-contractor, who still remembers that one such creature - if it can be called such - the last of them, is so readily befuddled by unnatural structures, so very baffled by even the notion of an artificial barrier and what it might be for, that all that is required to keep it in check is the merest suggestion of a fence. A small stretch of wire between two posts would do, but why take half measures - this few inches’ worth of fence, representing the idea of dividing the land, of keeping things on one side of itself, of the denial of movement from one place on this earth to another, is enough to keep certain old things stupefied on the few nights when they still leak through from the oldest hidden places and into our own spaces, tempted by the light and meat in the houses nearby. You can perhaps feel it, if you pass by the thin fence on a moonless night when the creature is there, though you won’t see it…at most, you’ll experience the sense of a shapeless form that seems to occupy the air, a thickening pile of irrational musculature engaged in slow, witless contemplation of an object that shouldn’t be there, and serves a purpose as beyond its ken as the idea that, were it to notice you, it shouldn’t envelop and digest you.

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wrong calorific value

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After consulting Tiss and Farnsley’s “Trade Sign - The Authoritative Guide to Poles, Shingles and Balls” (St Neot’s Press pub. 1847) this appears to be a modern variant of the trade shingle, where a craftsman would display both their wares and their prowess in creating such.

In this instance, one would assume it’s for a simple fence-builder or hedger, but the use of the lug on the lower left post indicate that rather than a completed boundary, it’s an empty display board for another trade, that of the jobbing geologist.

The mesh-work is a clear giveaway. This would have originally been wooden, vines or cord and indicates the crystalline lattice-sign of the traditional rocksmith*, an almost extinct profession these days. From that lattice, elaborately polished items would be suspended, indicating the specialty and rank, from the humble sedimentary pebblewrights on upwards to the highly renowned Master Mineralist Igneous.

The size of and height of this shingle puts it at a mid-level artisan, probably of the metamorphic school and the single lug shows a beginning specialization in the Cryptocrystalline arts.

I believe Mr. @frauenfelder to be completely right in his suggestion. It is, indeed, for hanging agate.

*T&F - Ch.7 - “Of The Natural Sciences”.

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I suspect is nothing nefarious or sketchy.

For reasons unknown (some of which may be related to things we are not allowed to mention) these two posts were required to be place here. Then, since the distance between the posts represented a possible danger to a child who might get their head stuck between the posts, the fencing was added to mitigate the risk.

That was easy :slight_smile:

Fence isn’t skinny. Everything else is super fat.

Sorry, all the good jokes were already taken.

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Keeps out demons, obviously! Like the Gorgon faces from ancient Greece. Or the Onigawara roof tiles in Japan.
Everyone knows galvanized metal wards off evil!
Gotta keep them sneaky netherworld beasties out of your home.

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meeting a legal requirement to “put a fence between the two properties”.

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prison yard for criminal supermodels?

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google map glitch IRL?

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The only idea you are forbidden from mentioning is the one suggesting it’s for hanging a gate.

What’s 2+2?

The only idea you are forbidden from mentioning is the one suggesting it’s 4.

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Well, my explanation would be that someone took down the rest of it, but skipped these two either because they’re set in a mass of concrete, or the posts are set extra-deep, for the reason that shall not be named.

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