Silver Iodide (Photos of ice-nine)

You may have heard of a guy named Kurt Vonnegut. What you might not know is that his lesser-known little brother Bernie was the guy who came up with the idea of using AgI for cloud seeding.

From little bro Kurt's Timequake:

Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop?

Answer: That is bird poop, too.

So much for science, and how helpful it can be in these times of
environmental calamities. Chernobyl is still hotter than a Hiroshima baby
carriage. Our underarm deodorants have eaten holes in the ozone layer.

And just get a load of this: My big brother Bernie, who can't draw
for sour apples, and who at his most objectionable used to say he didn't
like paintings because they didn't do anything, just hung there year after
year, has this summer become an artist!

I shit you not! This Ph.D. physical chemist from MIT is now the
poor man's Jackson Pollock! He squoozles glurp of various colors and
consistencies between two flat sheets of impermeable materials, such as
windowpanes or bathroom tiles. He pulls them apart, et voila! This has
nothing to do with his cancer. He didn't know he had it yet, and the
malignancy was in his lungs and not his brain in any case. He was just
farting around one day, a semi-retired old geezer without a wife to ask
him what in the name of God he thought he was doing, et voila! Better late
than never, that's all I can say.

Sorry, it has nothing to do with AgI, but indulge me.

Silver halide has played a profoundly important role in film photography, but the late B. Vonnegut played a profoundly important role in elucidating its usefulness in cloud seeding. I've read in various places that it inspired K.V. to come up with ice-nine, but I'm not sure if it's true.