If you get struck out side of a car you would want it to flow through you and into the ground... not just circulate around your body.

BTW I don't think a lightning strike will let you survive, it is rare and this video is a troll(Fake).

>> ^Bluebeard:
>> ^NordlichReiter:
nsfw
BTW most electrical damage to the body involves massive burning and entry and exit wounds, thats... if you are grounded. You better hope you are grounded because if you aren't its not going to be good.

Surely the point is you don't want to be grounded!?! If you are grounded, electricity flows THROUGH you to the ground. If you aren't grounded, it won't. Eg: Being sat in a car, the rubber tyres insulate the car and prevent it being grounded.
Oh and fake IMO, I don't think there is any way a camera would survive a lightning hit to make the film recoverable. Magnetic tape would probably burn and a digital one would never survive.

>> ^chilaxe:
Would the video be recoverable if that was what it did to his hand?


No, not if he had that kind of damage to his hand. Lightning creates an EMP when it strikes due to the huge release of electrons. Video tape uses magnetic fields to store the video data on the tape. Assume there was not extensive physical damage to the tape, it would have been erased on recovery. I also find it strange that the camera would capture 5 whole frames of the lightning strike.

Dupe: http://www.videosift.com/video/Understanding-How-Lightning-Strikes

Agghh, aarggghg.. my brains is coming out my ears. This may be the most misinformed and misinforming video I have ever seen!

Like it has been said so many times before, evolution does not cover the beginning of new life, that's abiogenesis and is a chapter of its own, evolution covers the multitude of life. From the point of abiogenesis, which the religious party line describes as "lightning striking a mud puddle" (which is pretty close to the truth), evolution by natural selection takes over, in the sense that it explains what happens then.

It's funny how completely convinced the woman is that her case is right: "Life from non-life, apart from God's intervention, is a fairy tale. But apart from the obvious truth (...) blah blah"
Me dumb, me no understand simple scientific theory. Duuurrr.

>> ^examininglibertarian:
"Rotten tomatoes rating" - Moral based movies typically only do well among their target audiences. Look at the recent war movies for an example. Pretty weak attack vector.
True in a sense, but also Rotten tomatoes takes the ratings of many, many reviewers and is one of the best gauges of a movie's perception in the wider world. And to say that a 'moral' movie only does well in its target audience... does that mean that a movie should only be judged on how well the already converted see it?

"Science leads you to killing people" - entire section taken out of context. He is talking about the scientific explanation of the origin of life as a dehumanizing influence. He is NOT claiming that every scientific advance is evil.
No, he pretty much is saying that science is evil. If you asked him to rationalize it after giving him the given examples of science doing good, he would say something like that sure, science can do good, but it needs a tempering hand from religion to guide it. Which of course is complete nonsense as all religion has done for centuries is tried to stifle science whenever it proves their beliefs to be wrong.

"Naked vulnerable superpower" - The United States has military alliances with all the countries he mentions. I cannot fathom the link here in trying to Make Ben Stein a bloodthirsty warmonger. War that cannot happen? I agree that all of them happening at once would be virtually impossible, but individually... The US would not have to unilaterally attack anybody, they would be pulled in by military treaties that they have already agreed to. Now, Ben Steins argument is weak too, US military spending is [s]ufficient and just needs to get more [e]fficient.

But his whole argument is based on 'now imagine if they all happened at once. And also to suggest that the US military spending is ANYTHING but grossly inflated is insane. He is using fear mongering to... well, actually I don't know what, what is his aim in his rant? He just wants a bigger army for the US? Yeah, that's a compassionate person.


"Contemptuous regard for rule of law" - The narrator was really fishing for a soundbite on this one. He creates a very nice straw man and sets up Ben stein as a law-shunning malcontent, when he merely differentiated between law and ethics. It IS possible to disagree with laws and still follow them. The fact that he is not in prison is proof of this.
Ben is a little off, but the narrator is worse.

I do agree that he drew a long bow here and twanged it pretty hard. But I think the point he started to make before he went off the rails is that Stein is picking and choosing which laws he wants to adhere to, and suggesting that laws have zero baring at all on issues where he doesn't agree with them.

Stein is someone using nothing more than scare tactics to try and force a world of ignorance onto people. He continues to use the dirt/mud hit by lightning bullcrap as this preposterous notion that he expects people to scoff at.

Even if it were true that science thought that life may have started via a lightning strike into a puddle of mud... I'd have no problem with that if they had good evidence to back it up. These creationists seem to have GREAT issue with thinking that we've evolved from anything lesser than humans, they find it abhorrent to think that we evolved from apes. Why? What's so horrendous in thinking that our long ago forbears were apes? How does that really change who you are, are you repulsed to think that some of your behaviors can be explained because they were born from earlier times in the wild?

This 'I either don't understand or don't like the truth so I'll invent this cushier, softer fantasy and believe in that' notion really, really shits me.

I have twice had lightning strike a tower about 300 ft from me, which would appear to be three times farther than this yard is perhaps? These were no ambiguous giggle-about-the-dog loud noises, these was a FINGER OF ZEUS class event that were loud and riveting beyond compare. If lightning really struck that yard, those people would be pooping twinkies of surprise at that distance, that dog would be cowering at the owners feet. Fake! Or perhaps it's Lightning Lite, a new, friendlier face on an old weather tradition?

I agree with Detlev. There should be some collateral damage. Also, the area around the blast would have been charged and the dog and human spectators would be shocked if they were that distance from the strike. Also, the image does not appear to be consistent with other lightning strike footage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sn65RFvJKnk). Finally, knock back aside, the camera would most likely have had some interference from that range as lightning creates an EMP when it strikes (http://www.ees-group.co.uk/downloads/Secondary%20Effects.pdf). The image should have been distorted by the camera man losing footing and the EMP causing a sputter in the footage.

Bottom line: it looks photoshop to me. If it's not, it looks AT BEST looks like a reflection off something else.

Has anyone here actually seen the site of a lightning strike? If this were real, there would be a hole in the ground. Even a small fork would leave a divot or two. The grass isn't even ruffled, so no, this is not real.

I'm not ready to declare this a fake, but I'm not endorsing it as legit either. I just don't know. But I'm going to address a couple of the statements made here.

it would have hit a tree, especially since there were some that close

"The tallest objects in a storm don't always get struck by lightning. It's true that taller objects are closer to the clouds, but as discussed previously, lightning can strike the ground at a close distance to a tall object. Taller objects may have a higher possibility of a strike, but where lightning is concerned, the strike path is not predictable." from http://science.howstuffworks.com/lightning2.htm

and it certainly wouldn't have been 'caught' in at least 3 frames as it is in this video, it's a lot shorter than that.

I don't think you can really make that claim without more knowledge about the camera. Based on the quality of the video, it appears to be a fairly cheap camera, but that could just be the compression. We have no idea how many FPS they were recording at nor how many re-strikes made up this bolt, so we can't determine how many frames a bolt of lightning would appear in. If we assume it's a cheap camera, then we have to consider the possibility that the crappy sensor would not recover from such a high intensity light very quickly.

And as far as the "travels through the power lines" thing, you'd have to be an idiot to believe that. Everyone knows that electricity is fucking lazy. It wants the easiest path to ground. Air is a terrible conductor, hence the reason you don't get zapped when you walk by a fucking outlet. If the lightning were indeed traveling through the lines, it would have stayed there, not just randomly jumped out in someone's back yard for him to videotape and put on youtube.

A power line is not going to be sufficient to contain a lightning bolt. I doubt it's possible for the core bolt to travel through a power line at all, but it's certainly possible for one of the smaller branches to. But these smaller branches are still seeking a path to the ground and I see no reason why they wouldn't arc to the earth rather than travel several miles to the transfer station, given the opportunity.

The comparison to household AC isn't of much use. Lightning may be electricity but a household circuit and the circuit of a lightning bolt are far, far different aside from sharing the basic properties.

I also don't see a single power line anywhere in this entire video.

I thought the gigantic power line strung just beyond the fence at the far end of the yard was pretty obvious.

Anyway, I doubt this is a video of a bolt of lightning striking anywhere near that dog. The shockwave at that range would be rather powerful. Even if nobody had a cognitive reaction to the strike, things would have moved. At best, I think we've got some "stray" voltage sparking in the yard. I went and found a few copies of this video and went frame by frame taking some screenshots into photoshop to evaluate. There's a bolt that comes down that I do not see when the video is playing normally, even now that I know it's there. I suspect this bolt is a ways off in the distance. The motion of the camera causes a streak that could give the impression that it's on the near side of the fence. After that are the 3 S-shaped bolts that are plainly seen in the video, and are all of identical shape and size. These definitely don't look real, but they also don't look like something someone who was trying to fake a lightning strike would put in either. I wonder if they are some sort of lens or sensor artifact? Maybe even some peculiar electrical interference?

I do believe this is a smelly fake. and pretty much anyone who's been photographing lightning storms or just seen it close up a couple of times will tell you the same.

me, I've actually seen a lightning strike at about the same distance more than once and for one, it would have hit a tree, especially since there were some that close - and it obviously didn't because you can see when a lightning hits a tree (it's quite the physical force).
second, lightning that close to the ground would only be seen as an almost direct line, it's a lot higher above the ground that it splits and chains, and it certainly wouldn't have been 'caught' in at least 3 frames as it is in this video, it's a lot shorter than that.

so the sound might've been genuine, and they might've seen a real lightning close nearby, but I suppose they didn't catch it on film and decided to fake it. shame on them.

Lightning strike, or the spectral hand of Max Headroom?
http://youtube.com/watch?v=z52uxxyEy0E&feature=related

You do the math.

Irishman, I think that you are commenting on the wrong video. My "Lightning Strikes Rudy Guiliani" video can be found below.

Yeah i was thinking this too. Basically, I think sifters downvote vids when they're fakes cuz they don't like being deceived. Only excellent fakes get upvotes, usually cuz they're very well done, they're a natural accident (e.g. a bizzare lightning strike), they're an 'evolution in action' type vid (e.g. an 'unbelievably' stupid thief who gets caught by the police) or they're funny. So i'm thinking this is not really a runner - more opinions? suggestions? other ideas for a collective?

I have had lightning strike (approx) this close twice. Both times I can tell you was really, REALLY god damned LOUD.

The electricity spreads out. So the people closer to the point where the lightning hits the ground are bound to be more affected by it.
Actually there are other documented cases of lightning striking at football games. It's weird.