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The Odd Effects of Being Struck By Lightning
HughPickens.com writes: "Ferris Jabr reports in Outside Magazine that every year, more than 500 Americans are struck by lightning. Roughly 90 percent of them will survive, but those survivors will be instantly, fundamentally altered in ways that still leave scientists scratching their heads. For example, Michael Utley was a successful stockbroker who often went skiing and windsurfing before he was struck by lightning. Today, at 62, he lives on disability insurance. "I don't work. I can't work. My memory's fried, and I don't have energy like I used to. I aged 30 years in a second." Lightning also dramatically altered Utley's personality. "It made me a mean, ornery son of a b****." Utley created a website devoted to educating people about preventing lightning injury and started regularly speaking at schools and doing guest spots on televised weather reports.
Mary Ann Cooper, professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is one of the few medical doctors who have attempted to investigate how lightning alters the brain's circuitry. According to Cooper, the evidence suggests lightning injuries are, for the most part, injuries to the brain, the nervous system, and the muscles. Lightning can ravage or kill cells, but it can also leave a trail of much subtler damage and Cooper and other researchers speculate that chronic issues are the result of lightning scrambling each individual survivor's unique internal circuitry (PDF). "Those who attempt to return to work often find they are unable to carry out their former functions and after a few weeks, when coworkers get weary of 'covering' for them, they either are put on disability (if they are lucky) or fired," she writes.
Mary Ann Cooper, professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is one of the few medical doctors who have attempted to investigate how lightning alters the brain's circuitry. According to Cooper, the evidence suggests lightning injuries are, for the most part, injuries to the brain, the nervous system, and the muscles. Lightning can ravage or kill cells, but it can also leave a trail of much subtler damage and Cooper and other researchers speculate that chronic issues are the result of lightning scrambling each individual survivor's unique internal circuitry (PDF). "Those who attempt to return to work often find they are unable to carry out their former functions and after a few weeks, when coworkers get weary of 'covering' for them, they either are put on disability (if they are lucky) or fired," she writes.
Having millions of volts of electricy pumped through a person's body causes nervous system damage and changes. Who would have guessed?
...The Odd Effects of Being Struck By Lightning...
And here I was hoping for special powers like instant genius or telepathic abilities, and it turns out that the best we can hope for is instant Alzheimer?
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I worked for a lightning research lab in college. From what I remember, lightning can strike up to 60 miles (?) from the host cloud if the internal charges of the cloud are "right" for it. My take away was if you can see bolts of lightning then you're (possibly) within range.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
The main change is that when I hear people say "You're more likely to get hit by lightning than to have X happen" I can say "I've already been hit by lightning."
Back around 2000, I was with a group of people at an observatory up in the mountains, which we'd reached by ski-lift-gondola, after some discussion about whether the weather was turning thundery and we should cancel it because we might get stuck there for the day which would mess up our schedule. The thunderstorm decided to show up, and I was outside the observatory looking at the mountains. A few raindrops started to fall, and a bolt of lightning bounced off the building and hit me on the head. The impact wasn't very hard, maybe like dropping a pen onto a hard floor from 5 feet. My wife yelled at me to get in out of the rain. And we did in fact get stuck up there for a few hours - the gondola system shut down when the lightning struck, leaving a gondola full of kids hanging about 100 feet from the observatory for a while before they could restart it, and once they had them safely unloaded they left it stopped until the storm was over.
The other effect was that I had to tell my wife about the previous time when the group I'd with had almost been hit by lightning, hiking at the top of Colorado mountains when the early-afternoon thunderstorm set in. We'd sat down in a low rock shelter, and some of the folks were having sparks from their fingers to the wet rocks, which were making a bit of a sizzling noise.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The last sentence of the summary explains a lot:
"Those who attempt to return to work often find they are unable to carry out their former functions and after a few weeks, when coworkers get weary of 'covering' for them, they either are put on disability (if they are lucky) or fired or made Slashdot editors (if they are really unlucky)," she writes."
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
A local doctor was struck by lighting and became a concert pianist as a result. You never know what might change your life forever.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
2. it looked to me as if the frontal lobe of the person in story was affected. Frontal lobe is associated with such changes in personality
I was recently struck by lightning. I am writing you to renew my request for a date per your stated conditions.
Have gnu, will travel.
I was part of the ground circuit when lightning struck my house and blew the ring main on its way through - I had the misfortune of happening to be plugging in the TV at the time, got thrown across the room. Only permanent effect as far as I can tell is a marked reduction in tolerance for idiots.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
the brain an nervous system is a complex and fragile low voltage electrical signaling system
lets zap it with lightning
best we can guess is that "Mary Ann Cooper, professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago" who by the way retired in 2008 says that lighting fucks shit up
good god damn job
reaction time suffers as well
Michael Utley was a successful stockbroker who often went skiing and windsurfing before he was struck by lightning. Today, at 62, he lives on disability insurance. "I don't work. I can't work. My memory's fried, and I don't have energy like I used to. I aged 30 years in a second." Lightning also dramatically altered Utley's personality. "It made me a mean, ornery son of a b****."
Had it been an example where he became a greenpeace or PETA speaker or something, it might be more shocking but this doesn't come across as entirely surprising.
I would assume that most lightning injuries wouldn''t have any observable effects on personality, because more often than not they're not going to hit the brain. But that could be a wrong impression. Maybe a high voltage jolt to the peripheral nervous system always carries back to the brain along nerve fibers and does damage there.
Once met with a guy who install lightning rod in 80+ storeys buildings.
He said, grounding the current from above is not enough. When lightning strikes,
the current is ground, but then the many computers in the building would malfunction.
Special technique is required that only few companies can get it right.
I would suspect the current has to be shield like coaxial cable or the circuits along
the current path will got damaged. In this case the victim's brain.
"Ferris Jabr reports in Outside Magazine that every year, more than 500 Americans are struck by lightning. Roughly 90 percent of them will survive, but those survivors will be instantly, fundamentally altered in ways that still leave scientists scratching their heads.
Yes, sure, it has some unpleasant effects, but keep it in perspective. How much resources should we as a society be dedicating to lightning strike victims? Nearly ten times as many people die drowning every year as get struck by lightning (including non-fatal strikes). In fact, you're only about twice as likely to get struck by lightning as to die from a terrorist attack, which a statistical non-risk. And we don't go running around panicking about terrorism... oh, wait...
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
"Professor" is a Latin masculine noun, and as such is correctly paired with the adjective "emeritus". As I said in my post, if you want to refer to a woman as a "professor", which I have zero objection to, then use the correct adjective, namely "emeritus". If you want to refer to a woman by the latinized "professora", then by all means "emerita" is correct as well. However, "professor emerita" is anglicized pig-latin bullshit which merely serves to mark those who use it as wannabes, who never studied Latin but wish to use an exotic phrase to aggrandize themselves in front of their peers.
Now that you know, please feel free to use whatever phrase you prefer, in full knowledge of the various probable consequences.
I was struck as a kid, probably 11 or so years old, when a thunderstorm rolled in during a little league baseball game. I happened to be opening a car door, so was grounded when I was hit. My forearm turned black and blue, like a massive bruising, but I didn't feel any pain in my arm. I was blinded for a short time, my eyes were not closed when the lighting struck. Outside of a headache from the flash, I had no short or long term damage. Yes, I was extremely lucky to have been mostly grounded.
The Guinness record holder was struck 7 times, and lived to 71. Hard to say if the long term effects led to suicide, but an interview of him I heard long ago seemed to indicate a pretty normal guy.
TFA also indicates that not all incidents lead to permanent damage, physical or psychological. As with most events dealing with electricity, there are a massive number of factors involved making each event unique. For example, when I was in the military I saw two people guy get popped by a 550KW generator. Both guys mishandled the same coupling, both were in Texas and on similar training grounds. The primary different was weather and luck. One guy's clothing caught fire and he suffered only minor burns as they put his clothing out, the other guy died almost instantly. It was winter so rainy and wet when the first guy was popped, making its likely that his wet clothing caused a grounding effect which saved him. The second happened in the summer, extremely dry and hot.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I was having a safety meeting with a guy when he told me how he had been hit by lightning once on a construction site. I said, "what'd you do?" He said, "I got up and ran! The only thing I could think of was that I didn't want to get hit again!"
He seemed like a normal enough guy, but he was adamant about not wanting to get struck again, that's for sure.
This isn't Rome. This is America. We speak American English here. Some of that is Anglicized Latin. But it's not Latin, and doesn't have to follow the rules of Latin any more than anything else borrowed from other languages has to follow the rules of those languages.
This was 1991 I belive. I was sitting on this tire swing looking at the thunder storm coming into the valley over the city. Next to me 30 feet infront and 20 to the side was a tennis court all fenced off with a 20 foot fence.
As I was sitting there for a bit watching lightning strikes all of a sudden everything went white for a second and when it dissapeared I heard a huge bang and while looking at the sand below my feet, I saw electricity flying around on the ground. Took me a few secs to get orientged again and all I herd was "Holly Fuck", "Holly fuck" "Did you feel that all over your body" from the two guys that were playing in the tennis court.
Nex thing I know some panic attack hit me and I booted it home about 20 feet away. I started to get a clod sweat and when I felt my heart it must have been going 400 + beats per minute. Then it slowed down rapidly and all I could do is sit on the couch and go WTF?!!!
So for about a few weeks after that everytime there was a thunder strom and the lightning strikes got close to home I always felt wird electric charge aroung me. Well I never stuck around and booted it home the second I got the feeling.
Can't say it changed me but was a weird experience.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Why is this rated to 0? It's a true statement--not something to downmod. Downmoding such a comment, I'm sure, actually bespeaks ignorance or violation of the terms of modding! And while that's not new for /., it's still something to have the actual admins take a look at. It's especially problematic, though, since it's a true statement.
While it is preferable to follow certain rules of grammar for use of Latin phrases, that is within the confines of acceptable English practice. "Profesora" has not, in fact, ever been used--as far as I am aware--in the English language, as an English term. Not, at least, enough to be conventional rather than eccentric. These days, perhaps all the more due to it being Spanish (though being in the Western US where we have a lot of Spanish speakers, perhaps I'm just reinforced given that perception; the east coast, on the other hand, tends not to know jack about Spanish from our POV). I am okay with it to the extent someone would have a Latin or Romance background, but the significations associated with "professor" vs. "profes[s]ora" aren't quite the same, so from that POV I would avoid it myself since it would seem to be a mis-communication, therefore an error.
And "-a" isn't even a solid indication, in English, that a term is actually a feminine for Latin. ("-a" isn't even just feminine in Latin, depending on case!). It *frequently* is in Spanish, but not enough for someone without the prior knowledge. For the last three or so centuries, however, even when Latin was widely taught, been acceptable to mix Latin forms as properly understood or most likely to be, rather than force correctness based on the classical Latin forms (and I have critiques on usage dating back over a 100 years in my personal library), so I don't get the hostility: oversensitivity to "correctness", to me, bespeaks being a poseur--as is often the case in English grammar.
It all seems like the pedantry of correct for case with "I and me" without regard for the actual use-intentions of the personal speaking English, given that the complaints are often applied to usages which antedate the oldest grammars and indicate a different mode of thinking altogether--i.e. evince a feature of English-speakers' mind that doesn't even exist in other classical languages. (Even modern, simplified English, possesses pre-classical features, and actual mixtures of features that span several language families, that ante-date the periods of major influence by Romance and Latin upon the Teutonic, e.g. altering mid-vowels to change tense, not just endings). It's the...gilded age of English armchair philology and grammatical-wishful thinking by the sophomorically over-read and over-credentialed, regarded only for being critics and clever...just not "right."
But in general, critiques of English usage typically proceed out of posing rather than expertise. It's a long-standing tradition in Anglophonic countries, and unfortunate for all the confusion has bred. e.g. I was recently standing in line at a post office and literally stood next to two old women, one who had been warned against the horrific error in saying "dug" rather than "digged", and the other warned contrarily about the error of "digged" over "dug." Both were also pissed I wouldn't take their side...or amused that I could explain the history of that "issue" though a young man, and that the other was so stupid to prefer a "non-word" they had never encountered. I actually found myself in disbelief that either could have suffered such limited exposure.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
I heard a news report - might have been BBC - years ago that a study had found that a high correlation between lightning strike victims and the probability of developing Multiple Sclerosis later in life.
BS. The nervous system is an electrochemical system, not an electrical one; and, while it is physically fragile, it is not nearly as electrically fragile as you suggest, exactly because it is electrochemical rather than electrical in nature. This is a significant reason why 90% of lightning strike victims survive (the skin's lower resistance being another), and why execution through electrocution is nowhere close to being an instant process.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Many thinks erroneously that after they installed a Whole House Surge Protector everything else would be fine
That Whole House Surge Protector might be able to clamp a sudden surge from the outside, but the respond time often isn't fast enough to save the delicate electronic devices connected to the wall sockets
What you really need is a layered approach --- getting a Whole House Surge Protector to clamp a _lengthy_ surge from the outside, while still attach your delicate electronic devices to surge protectors with fast response (something like in the nano-second range) that plug into the wall sockets
Three links that might be able to assist you:
http://techomebuilder.com/inde...
http://www.electronichouse.com...
http://www.us-tech.com/RelId/1...
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
http://www.cepro.com/article/t...
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Professor is an English word, albeit one with a Latin origin, and it has been an English word for about 700 years. Most English words do not get inflected by gender. It must be admitted that many occupation-words that can be used as pronouns are inflected (actor/actress, waiter/waitress, etc.), but professor is not among those words. Professora does not appear in any English dictionary I tried, such as dictionary.reference.com. Professor, emeritus, and emerita all appear in every dictionary I tried.
Furthermore, "Professors Emeriti/ae" is often used as the plural. The 's' plural demonstrates that "professor" is being used in its English-language form.
Surely if a student were to talk about their "professors", you would not lecture them on their ignorant use of plurals. Why, then, do you insist that the professor is "professor emeritus" is actually a different word in a different language and therefore subject to different inflections?
And if that isn't convincing, there's the fact that "Professor Emerita" is an officially-conferred title, and therefore it is correct by definition:
http://www.sfu.ca/policies/gaz... -- an example from Canada
http://www.ucc.ie/en/academics... -- an example from Ireland
http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/artic... -- an example from the United States
What I find particulary fascinating though is the insecurity apparent in perhaps a large number of readers who prefer to defend and repeat a corrupt usage from someone who may not have known better, lest their own competency in English be considered.
The pot calling the kettle black.