Lightnings captured at 7.207 frames-per-second | Hacker News Reader

Lightnings captured at 7.207 frames-per-second

alexandrosmaragos.com

64 pointsSlimArt31 comments

This is very beautiful, and if you step back for a second, quite awesome. Just remember that those long pauses in the movie where the "stream" is held between the Earth and cloud, that entire process lasts for less than what we can see normally. And we've developed technology to figuratively slow down time for ourselves. I mean, think about it. That's almost a terawatt of power. I'll wait for that number to sink into you. Yes, TERAWATT. Like if we harnessed that power like Tony Stark does for his arc reactor, we'd comfortably be able to run our kilowatt class desktops for over 10^9 seconds. That's 31 years from something that ephemeral.

Of course, we can't do that yet. But we've got the technology (he says it's from 2007) to record it to a factor so slow that if we aren't able to make use of it, we can atleast look at it and marvel at the beauty and sheer destructive power of this planet.

Awe-inspiring man, from natural and technological point of view.

In-before complainers - I may/may not have taken a bit of a poetic license.

Just so you know we've had the technology to slow it down for over 80 years now. It's nothing new.

Also, you are confusing power and energy. It has a lot of peak power sure, but it lasts for less than 90 microseconds.

The total energy of the most powerful strokes is about enough to run a hairdryer for 6 hours. Most lightning strokes are much less.

PS. Sorry about your poetry.

Ah yes indeed, I confused instantaneous power with total energy. I am unable to edit the previous comment.

Regarding the slowing of film, yes indeed, you simply roll it faster . Digital is something new. I just wanted to point out that even with our 'old' tech, there are some mind-blowing things that we can observe till today. It's like giving a child a microscope.

Direct links: http://vimeo.com/28457062 http://vimeo.com/30577412

Amazing to watch all the leaders spread out looking for ground and then when one finally connects, boom... incredible.

Title should be 7,207 frames per sec.

Depends what country you're from :)

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-0169/overview-9/inde...

Well the article is in English as is this entire site, so that would be a fairly obtuse argument to make.

I agree that ideally it would be formatted the English way (being an English language article and this being an English language site) and agree that ambiguity is a bad thing but I think the context makes it pretty clear what the intended meaning is.

I'd guess that most people intelligent enough to discuss the localisation of thousands separators are also intelligent enough to infer the difference between 7.207 frames per second and 7,207 frames per second when applied to the photography of lightning strikes.

So I think we should extend the original poster the benefit of the doubt and assume that they just wrote the title in their native tongue without a second thought rather than maliciously intending to deceive us all.

> rather than maliciously intending to deceive us all.

No one think they were trying to deceive, but it's possible they were trying to provoke commenters or appear worldly. Still, most likely explanation is just a mistake.

And some countries call a "period" a "full stop": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_stop

Frightfully good point, old chap.

perhaps just 7207 so everyone's happy

Some countries reverse the notation used in the English speaking world. E.g., 1,000.01 would be 1.000,01 in France

The preferred separator in French is a non-breaking space, so it in fact would be 1 000,01. But that is irrelevant because this article is not in French. It really should read 7,207 images per second, which incidentally is the name of the video in the original article.

One very "good" application to learn these things is Microsoft's Excel. It fully implements regional settings, so if you want to open/save a .csv file, it will automatically use the list separator for your country as the field separator. If the .csv is a "normal" comma separated file, and your regional list separator is set as semicolon, tough luck. You can still open them with the advanced "something-separated" wizard, but it's manual. Also, if you type a formula you just found on the 'net that looks like =CONCATENATE(A1,B1) it will not be recognized because you still have to use the regional list separator, so you need =CONCATENATE(A1;B1) to work.

In that case the title should be in French and should say 7.207,00 right? :)

Looks like a very large, very high-voltage SYN/ACK.

BBC also just did a special with a team catching Sprites above a storm in slow motion as well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF2gW2g5qKM

(sadly the quality isn't the best, go to ~2 min left in the video for the best part)

I would be interested to know how long that main column of lightning persists - and what determines that time.

There's a clock in the bottom left of the video.

The video stops before the lightning disappears.

Looks like nature is running a shortest path algorithm. I'm guessing A*.

Keep in mind it's not the shortest distance, but rather the shortest electrical potential.

A second thing is that it's the shortest potential at that moment. But the lightning changes things, so the new shortest potential can move. (The immense electrical field of the lightning moves things.) But once the channel is ionized it stays that way - this is why you see forked behavior instead of a straight line.

It's beautiful!

I was surprised why 7.2 fps is worth mentioning, I almost ignored this video because of the "wrong" title. The original source does say 7,207 and that is clear enough that it's not 7 fps, it's 7k fps. Even 7207 would be clear enough but 7.207 would suggest 7.2 to (?) most of the world. I am quite sure the entire South Asia would think of 7.207 as 7, not 7k. I am quite sure that's more people than the European countries that write 7.207 for 7k.

(But then again, the US is 5% of the world population and uses imperial scale rather than metric scale and calls football "soccer" and calls a handball game "football")

German has the separators switched around.

Well, it is not only German -- Wikipedia has a nice map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark

And just leaving it as a number 7207 would make much more sense to everyone. Instead, 'prettiness' like commas or periods just confuse readers.

Or at least on HN, you could use 7.207*10^3 and be done with scientific notation.

Agreed, 7207 is good enough, commas (or fullstops) are helpful when there are more than 5 or 6 digits but there is no confusion with a 4-digit number.

>Or at least on HN, you could use 7.20710^3 and be done with scientific notation.

So would that 7.207 in 7.20710^3 be considered 7 decimal 207 or 7 thousand 207? :D

What is this blog spam doing on the front page?

Notice most SlimArt's submissions are of alexandrosmaragos.com

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