The strange formation resembles a tiny spire surrounded by a webby picket fence and is about 2 centimeters wide. Apparently nobody knows what it is, but Tom said that it may actually come from a spider (according to the way the web was spun)!
Instead of round silk threads this spider produces flat ribbons 40-80 nm in thickness. Still the material is as strong as Kevlar and much more elastic.
Pattern is a web mining module for the Python programming language.
It bundles tools for data retrieval (Google + Twitter + Wikipedia API, web spider, HTML DOM parser), text analysis (rule-based shallow parser, WordNet interface, syntactical + semantical n-gram search algorithm, tf-idf + cosine similarity + LSA metrics) and data visualization (graph networks).
Intuitive, well documented, and very powerful. A library to keep an eye on.
Check the example Belgian elections, June 13, 2010 - Twitter opinion mining
"environments that afford them a wide range of microbial exposures, such as traditional farms" == Noordwijk? In my former place we had horses and spiders but I don't know if that's enough to make it a farm...