I assumed that being struck by lightning was fairly common, but today I learned I was wrong. Apparently it only kills about 30 Americans per year, and I assumed it was more like 3000, or even 30,000.
As a child, I was in an indoor swimming pool in a house that was struck by lightning, and as a young man, I was in a car that was about 40 feet from a telephone pole that was struck by lightning. In both cases I was fine because of the Faraday cage effect, but the repeated near-misses and spectacular electrical violence made me think that lightning was a non-negligible hazard. I suppose that’s a rationalist lesson: don’t generalize from your experience of rare events if you can actually look up the probabilities.
I guess I wasted all that time training my kids in lightning safety techniques.
I assumed that being struck by lightning was fairly common, but today I learned I was wrong. Apparently it only kills about 30 Americans per year, and I assumed it was more like 3000, or even 30,000.
As a child, I was in an indoor swimming pool in a house that was struck by lightning, and as a young man, I was in a car that was about 40 feet from a telephone pole that was struck by lightning. In both cases I was fine because of the Faraday cage effect, but the repeated near-misses and spectacular electrical violence made me think that lightning was a non-negligible hazard. I suppose that’s a rationalist lesson: don’t generalize from your experience of rare events if you can actually look up the probabilities.
I guess I wasted all that time training my kids in lightning safety techniques.
Note that 90% of people struck by lightning survive, so that actual number struck per year is more like 300.