Your video, Lightning Strikes in Chicago Causes Some Sparks, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Probably the best lightning strike video I've ever seen. Wow.

Please tell me this was a lightning strike or other natural occurrence. Because if it was arson then hang that bastard by his toes. Forget the cost of clean up and replacement, the toxic fumes coming off those ties is enough to force an evacuation of the area.

Not at all. I hate seeing nice trees cut down as well.

I would guess they took it down because of the HUGE crack in a large branch that you can see at the start of the video.....oh...I just read the description where they explain EXACTLY why they took it down, it was dropping branches after a lightning strike, almost hitting someone. That likely means the trunk was also weakened, and it was certainly close enough to take out that house.

I can relate. I (sadly) took down a 30-40 meter Douglas Fir tree in my yard a few years back. It's still painful to think about. My tree had grown too tall, and had a weakened root system because it was growing sideways out of a small hill, and had massive gopher activity all around it. All the surrounding trees on other properties were cut well before we moved here, so it was also exposed to full wind. I was terrified that it was going to come down through my bedroom and kill the wife and myself, or through a neighbors house, so we had it cut. I've spent the nearly 3 years since then digging out the root ball (which WAS as weakened as I had thought) and turning the hole into a large pond. I still hate that we had to kill the tree, but it was a safety issue. At least I have firewood for years to come, and a pond.

Your video, Captain Disillusion: Lightning Strikes Car Debunked, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Captain Disillusion: Lightning Strikes Car Debunked has been added as a related post - related requested by Fantomas on that post.

The lightning strike takes some time - with several subsequent strikes.

Everything's out of focus - could just have been a cloud to cloud lightning strike - the "ball" here seems to be clouds lighting up from the strike. Nope. Don't believe it.

Cool, though.

To take a less emotional counterpoint :

a) Internal attacks like this, when considering the massive population of people (1/3rd of a billion), are extremely rare. Lightning strikes compete very well with these in terms of lethality. So what exactly do you do? Turn the country inside out (do things legislatively/executively that affect everyone) because there's a chance that 1 in 300 million people will once every year or two do something like this?

Also) Southern generals fought over secession. Today, the civil war is taught as being largely over slavery - but that's heavily revisionist, since at the time of the civil war the war's implications on slavery weren't even mentioned outside of black newspapers. White people were fighting over who gets to run the south, the south, or the much richer and better politically connected north.

To illustrate, the emancipation proclamation only freed slaves in the states participating in the cesession, not elsewhere. The remainder were freed after the civil war. Reason dictates that it was done primarily to cause disruption in the rebelling south, and not for any particular racial sympathy. (Here's a map for those interested. States marked in blue got to keep their slaves : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Emancipation_Proclamation.PNG).

In general, throughout human history, the defeated are usually historically revised to appear as bad as possible, so there are no questions about whether the right thing was done, and no sympathies linger for the defeated. So the south being turned into a ~1~dimensional~evil~enslaving~caricature~ of history is rather normal. Although, critical thinking people should probably know better than to fall for ancient propaganda.

-scheherazade

Lightning strikes have killed 24 people this year which makes them substantially more dangerous than Terrorism. We need to fight lightning up in the clouds before it strikes us down here.

And unlike terrorism, we might not even make more lightning by fighting the lightning.

BE A PATRIOT, WAR ON LIGHTNING STARTS NOW.

Quite an impressive lightning strike *quality

Shouldn't it be lightning strikes...?

Its a shame he missed the best opportunity to talk about step-potential.
The ONLY reason you should take short steps in lightning strikes....

Your video, How to Survive a Lightning Strike, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Your video, Lightning Strike Filmed at 11,000 FPS, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.