#HTE
Footage of Lightning Very Neatly Stripping a Tree
The ancient Greeks were extremely clever people who developed architectural, mathematical and philosophical principles that we still use today. However, they also believed that when lightning struck, it was because this guy was standing up on a cloud throwing the stuff down at us:
Of course that seems silly today, but imagine that you don’t know anything about meteorology, you’re standing outside the Temple of Athena or whatever during a rainstorm and suddenly you see something like this happen:
It seems almost natural that they’d invent a bunch of Avengers to explain the phenomena they couldn’t possibly deconstruct.
By the way, is it not impressive how cleanly the lightning bolt stripped that tree of branches while leaving the trunk largely intact? And does anyone know what the hell that puff of smoke to the right of the tree is? Here’s the same scene in GIF, courtesy of Sploid, so that you can study it:
It’s either a secondary strike, or there was an overwhelmed squirrel watching the whole thing and its brain just exploded.
http://www.core77.com/posts/45829/Footage-of-Lightning-Very-Neatly-Stripping-a-Tree