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Ball Lightning Created In the Lab
EWAdams writes to point us to a New Scientist report that the mysterious phenomenon of ball lighting has now been created in a Brazilian research lab. The phenomenon has long been reported anecdotally but never explained or understood. Scientists have devised numerous possible explanations, including mini black holes left over from the Big Bang, but have had little success in producing working examples. From the article: "A more down-to-earth theory... is that ball lightning forms when lightning strikes soil, turning any silica in the soil into pure silicon vapor. As the vapor cools, the silicon condenses into a floating aerosol bound into a ball by charges that gather on its surface, and it glows with the heat of silicon recombining with oxygen. To test this idea, a [Brazilian] team... took wafers of silicon just 350 micrometers thick, placed them between two electrodes and zapped them with currents of up to 140 amps. Then... they moved the electrodes slightly apart, creating an electrical arc that vaporised the silicon. The arc spat out glowing fragments of silicon but also, sometimes, luminous orbs the size of ping-pong balls that persisted for up to 8 seconds." Here is a movie of the phenomenon.
Don't worry, this is ball lightening, not ball lighting.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
You may not have witnessed ball lightning. Many species of extra terrestrial life have been said to look like jellyfish. An alien encounter seems far more likely by my reasoning.
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I recommend not using nylon sheets, an hours worth of charge really hurts.
Task Mangler
But could Koreans eat them?
I think there's some ball lightning coming out of that server.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The Koreans could worship them! The bouncing rabbit-size balls could help Men Tah Lee iLL (or whats his name) run the country!
The whole truth? Man you've been watching X-files too much!
Try "explanation".
Magic Missile should've been invented first! It's gonna take forever for me to get enough experience to get this...
> I think there's some ball lightning coming out of that server.
Wouldn't it be a great way to signal excessive load on a server? Except that then microsoft would embrace and extend the idea with ballMer lightning, which also throws chairs at you if it spots license irregularities.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
IS the scientist in this video wearing flip flops with this ball lightning scurrying around the floor by hiw feet? Is it just me or is this not a good idea. I want to see the blooper reel of this video.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
Ooooh Balmer Lightning - it bounces up and down, shouting "Developers! Developers!"
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
So, wait, they've recreated a 6/1 creature with Trample, that takes one red mana to cast, and is placed in the graveyard after this turn is completed?
Just don't tell me when they create a Lord of the Pit, the U.S. has a hard enough time preserving marshland's as it is.
Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.
I am just a Sun Blade and my story's seldom told
I have squandered my existence on some packets full of numbers such are data files
All porn and jest
Still the NAT hears what it wants to hear
and access denies the rest
Oh yes, access denies the rest
In the NOC there stands a boxen
and a server by its trade
and it carries the reminders
of every luser guest that logged on
and downloaded till it cried out
in its full Slashdotted shame
"My CPU is burning, but the hard drive still remains"
Yes, the data still remains . . .
Dee oh Ees *kissssssh*
Dee oh, Dee oh, Dee oh Ees
Dee oh Ees *kissssssh*
Dee oh, Dee oh, Dee oh, Dee oh, Dee oh Ees
KFG
That's not ball lightening, that's just shrinkage. Happens to men when they're swimming all the time. Usually not when the water's in the eighties though.
Yeah, that's typical too.
A ball lightning gun!
True. An interesting side effect of all of this is that we now know that 3 red mana = 140 amps.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
how many is a brazilian?