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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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")
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.