"Dave Fossett" <reply@via.newsgroup> wrote in message news:<hHm5b.177$bL1.7@news1.dion.ne.jp>...
> Pretty impressive thunderstorm here this evening. I was looking out of the
> window watching people rushing home from the station on their bikes with
> umbrellas bravely raised, and wondered why they weren't worried about being
> hit by lightning. It turns out that one person not far from here wasn't so
> lucky, although it sounds like he was on an exposed river bank.
> http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/national/news/20030903ic25.htm

The wife came out with some wonderful physics last time I talked to
her about lightning. I pointed out that if you count the time from the
flash to hearing the thunder, each 3 seconds is approximately 1
kilometre, so the storm at that time, although loud and bright, was
over 20 seconds or 6 km away, there was little to worry about. She
replied by telling me about Japanese thunder, where you get the rumble
first, then the lightning.

She always unplugs the telly - fair enough from a power surge point of
view - but shouldn't the aerial also be unplugged following the same
logic? She then said using a mobile inside the house is also dangerous
- it should be switched off too - as she'd heard that on a TV program
some time ago. I tried to work out the physics of that one - the only
possible answer I could think of was that in a car or other metal
object, you're protected by the Faraday Cage Effect, but somehow the
mobile phone breaks the effect, but then again a car has enough metal
parts in it to make a mobile phone insignificant, yet the Faraday Cage
still works.

Anyway, I realised a "Yes, dear" is the correct answer, not an indepth
analysis of the physics of lightning.

Ken