represented the flavors of Bell Gum. If three watermelons or lemons were aligned, the machine would dispense a pack of Bell Gum. With the great popularity of this machine, the fruit symbols prevailed, and are still depicted on some modern machines.
And if we may throw in our own mini-Imponderable, we always wondered what the bar symbol on slot machines signified. We assumed they were meant to be gold bars, but they weren’t tapered like them. It turns out that the bar was a stylized version of Bell Fruit Gum’s logo, now an example of obsolete product placement.
With the advent of nine-line slots with themes ranging from Monopoly to I Dream of Jeannie, the fruit symbols are a withering but not yet dead symbol of old-school gambling. It’s hard for a lemon to compete with Elvis-or Star Wars –themed slot machines for a gambler’s attention.
Submitted by Faye Railing of San Diego, California.
Why Does Lightning Have a Zigzag Pattern?
W e’re always pleased to meet a source who is enthusiastic about his work. Matt Bragaw, the lightning specialist at the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Melbourne, Florida, is such a guy. He shares his passion about lightning on his corner of his office’s Web site (at http://www.srh.noaa.gov/mlb/ltgcenter/whatis.html, including a nifty animation of a lightning strike). Matt was kind enough to answer some of our incessant follow-up questions. He warned us that although lightning was one of the earliest remarked upon natural phenomena, it is one of the least understood, with many of the major discoveries about it having been made in only the past fifteen years.
Although there are other kinds of lightning, such as heat lightning and Saint Elmo’s fire, the familiar zigzag lightning we’re talking about here is cloud-to-ground lightning (lightning inside a cloud, also known as cloud-to-cloud lightning, is actually more prevalent). Before we see any sign of lightning on the ground, turbulent wind conditions send water droplets up the cloud while ice particles fall downward. The top of the cloud usually carries a strong positive charge and the bottom a negative one. During the movement of the ice and water droplets within the cloud, electrons shear off the rising droplets and stick to the falling ice crystals. The opposite charges attract until a tremendous electrical charge occurs within the cloud. When the cloud can no longer hold the electrical field, sometimes a faint, negatively charged ladder channel, called the “stepped leader,” materializes from the bottom of the cloud.
While it might appear to us as if the bolt of lightning strikes the earth instantaneously, in one zigzag strike, what you are actually seeing is a whole series of steps, which are only about 50 meters in length. In an e-mail to Imponderables, Bragaw elaborates:
In what can be described as an “avalanche of electrons,” the leader’s path often splits, resplits, and re-resplits, eventually taking on a tendril-like appearance. Between each step, there is a pause of about fifty microseconds, during which time the stepped leader “looks” for an object to strike. If none is “seen,” it takes another step, “looks” for something to strike, etc. This process is repeated until the leader “finds” a target.
It is this “stepped” process that gives lightning its jagged appearance …Studies of individual strikes have shown a single leader can be comprised of more than 10,000 steps!”
Once the leader hits the ground, all of the other branches of the stepped leader’s channel stop propagation toward the earth.
We mentioned that the stepped leader is faint as it leaves the cloud and heads toward the ground. If so, then why is lightning usually so bright? The negatively charged stepped leader repels all negative charge in the ground, while attracting all positive charge, which sends energy back from the ground to the clouds. This
And if we may throw in our own mini-Imponderable, we always wondered what the bar symbol on slot machines signified. We assumed they were meant to be gold bars, but they weren’t tapered like them. It turns out that the bar was a stylized version of Bell Fruit Gum’s logo, now an example of obsolete product placement.
With the advent of nine-line slots with themes ranging from Monopoly to I Dream of Jeannie, the fruit symbols are a withering but not yet dead symbol of old-school gambling. It’s hard for a lemon to compete with Elvis-or Star Wars –themed slot machines for a gambler’s attention.
Submitted by Faye Railing of San Diego, California.
Why Does Lightning Have a Zigzag Pattern?
W e’re always pleased to meet a source who is enthusiastic about his work. Matt Bragaw, the lightning specialist at the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Melbourne, Florida, is such a guy. He shares his passion about lightning on his corner of his office’s Web site (at http://www.srh.noaa.gov/mlb/ltgcenter/whatis.html, including a nifty animation of a lightning strike). Matt was kind enough to answer some of our incessant follow-up questions. He warned us that although lightning was one of the earliest remarked upon natural phenomena, it is one of the least understood, with many of the major discoveries about it having been made in only the past fifteen years.
Although there are other kinds of lightning, such as heat lightning and Saint Elmo’s fire, the familiar zigzag lightning we’re talking about here is cloud-to-ground lightning (lightning inside a cloud, also known as cloud-to-cloud lightning, is actually more prevalent). Before we see any sign of lightning on the ground, turbulent wind conditions send water droplets up the cloud while ice particles fall downward. The top of the cloud usually carries a strong positive charge and the bottom a negative one. During the movement of the ice and water droplets within the cloud, electrons shear off the rising droplets and stick to the falling ice crystals. The opposite charges attract until a tremendous electrical charge occurs within the cloud. When the cloud can no longer hold the electrical field, sometimes a faint, negatively charged ladder channel, called the “stepped leader,” materializes from the bottom of the cloud.
While it might appear to us as if the bolt of lightning strikes the earth instantaneously, in one zigzag strike, what you are actually seeing is a whole series of steps, which are only about 50 meters in length. In an e-mail to Imponderables, Bragaw elaborates:
In what can be described as an “avalanche of electrons,” the leader’s path often splits, resplits, and re-resplits, eventually taking on a tendril-like appearance. Between each step, there is a pause of about fifty microseconds, during which time the stepped leader “looks” for an object to strike. If none is “seen,” it takes another step, “looks” for something to strike, etc. This process is repeated until the leader “finds” a target.
It is this “stepped” process that gives lightning its jagged appearance …Studies of individual strikes have shown a single leader can be comprised of more than 10,000 steps!”
Once the leader hits the ground, all of the other branches of the stepped leader’s channel stop propagation toward the earth.
We mentioned that the stepped leader is faint as it leaves the cloud and heads toward the ground. If so, then why is lightning usually so bright? The negatively charged stepped leader repels all negative charge in the ground, while attracting all positive charge, which sends energy back from the ground to the clouds. This
Similar Books
The Stand (Original Edition)
Stephen King
Near Dark: A Thriller
Brad Thor
World Without End
Chris Mooney
Beautiful Ghosts
Eliot Pattison
The Southpaw
Mark Harris
The Dark Griffin
K. J. Taylor
Ring Game
Pete Hautman