In a Disaster, Rush into Medieval Lighting Technology

M. and I were talking to a friend at the laundromat today. We don't use it anymore — we finally decided that our well could support a small washing machine — but we drop off magazines there. Magazines should move, once you have read them.

We bumped into an acquaintance there. John and his wife live on a ridge top, off the grid, which puts them in both forest-fire and lightning zones. They know that.

He said that a recent lightning strike exploded a big pine tree near their house. Along with the tree (and some baby rabbits), the strike fried their generator, inverted, and on-demand water heater — and of course it meant that they could not pump water from their well.

"We were back in the Stone Age!" he said.

It got dark, they wanted to read and play chess (they are serious about chess). What to do? Being a handy sort of guy, John rigged up a bank of LED lights with a 12-volt battery. It was too bright, his wife said.

But he could have made rush lights, if he had started a little earlier. 

It bothers me to see movies and TV shows set in the past where there are masses of (petroleum-based) candles blazing away.  Like the HBO series Vikings —by Thor's ring, they had so many candles that they must have brought them back from their raids by the longship-full. Kings could not afford so many candles!

But what the common people had were rush lights, as demonstrated in the video clip above. You have to overlook the non-medieval heat gun. The Brits are getting really absurd about safety issues.

So there you have it. Find some pithy grass and soak it in animal fat. Hold it in some kind of clip or support, and you have light, without the need to raid an abbey. 

When Lightning Strikes, Survivors Are Changed Forever

When I was a college student working a summer construction job in Taos, New Mexico, there was an old man next door, Eloy M., who people in the areas said had been struck by lightning.

They said that that was why he was shy, kind of reclusive — he worked his corn field, but never seemed to go anywhere.

Was it the lightning that changed him? According to this article in Arts Technica,

The changes in personality and mood that survivors experience, sometimes with severe bouts of depression as well, can strain families and marriages, sometimes to breaking point. Cooper likes to use the analogy that lightning rewires the brain in much the same way that an electrical shock can scramble a computer—the exterior appears unharmed, but the software within that controls its functioning is damaged.

It's a fascinating article both on the mechanics of lightning and what happens to survivors of lightning strikes.

Some quick Internet research turned up differing answers as to which U.S. states have the most lightning strikes.

Some say Florida is number one; others say Texas. New Mexico makes the top ten.

It Felt like Something Stepped on the House

 

Lightning struck near the house yesterday afternoon, and the shock wave felt like a big foot coming down, while the windows rattled and buzzed.

The incident reminded me of this cell phone snapshot from last month, taken up on the 2012 burn — one of two recently lightning-struck tree trunks close together. Both were already dead, of course.

Keeping me eye out for anther blasted tree like this one, closer to home.

It's Cosmic Ray Season

Thunder rumbled yesterday, during the night, and again this morning, with a mid-morning thunderstorm that included .30-caliber hail.

That was followed by a fire call that had me and two others in our brush truck—plus a sheriff's deputy and a BLM wildland engine—driving fruitlessly all over this corner of the county looking for a reported smoke sighting. We found nothing, and I suspect that someone saw a little wisp of storm cloud clinging to a mountainside and thought that it was smoke. That happens — and people are jumpy after last year's fire season.

Then it rained some more. The cosmic rays must really be acting up.

No one really knows what causes lightning to form and strike—the prevailing view is that it comes about as a result of collisions between ice crystals in clouds and hail stones. But because clouds and the lightning they produce are unpredictable and hard to pin down, no one has been able to prove this theory. Another theory, proposed by [Russian physicist Alexi] Gurevich twenty years ago, says that lightning is formed from the collisions between cosmic rays and water droplets present in thunderclouds. Now he and a colleague claim to have found evidence to support this idea.

Interesting stuff. Read the rest.