You can't post like this here, no matter how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. We ban accounts that post like that, so please don't do it again.
Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly in other places too. If you want to keep posting here, we'd appreciate it if you'd please fix that.
Being there is dangerous. Not only because that storm is really testing the roots of those trees but because in general high winds will cause branches to break off and trees to fall over. Walking through a forest during a storm is an easy way to get hurt or die.
I’m surprised to hear that. The best figures I could find seemed pretty flimsy, but one [0] put it at an average of 58 deaths annually while another [1] put it at 407 deaths related to “wind-related tree failure” between 1995 and 2007 (of which 38% or ~155 were people who were outside at the time).
If the last figure accurately represents the proportion who died while outside (vs when trees crushed their homes or cars), it would seem that those ~13 people a year in the US track lower than deaths due to lightning strikes [2].
Personally I’d rather not be out in a storm any more than I’d want to swim during lightning, but in absolute terms it does seem to be a healthy three orders of magnitude safer than being in a car in the US (at ~37K direct fatalities annually [3]).
I would presume that most people stay inside during giant storms.
Like statistics are a bad way to evaluate risk if the risk is easily avoided. Not many people die from swimming in lava; it is still wrong to conclude jumping into lava is safe.
> but in absolute terms it does seem to be a healthy three orders of magnitude safer than being in a car in the US (at ~37K direct fatalities annually [3]).
Absolute terms of being in a car measured this way don't make sense.
People in the US are exposed to tens of billions of hours of driving annually and probably low millions of hours of being in bad storm conditions in forests. (I don't know, do 1 out of 300 of us even spend an hour in that?)
This is like saying that because few people die from playing Russian roulette, it's not too big of a concern to play now and then.
The response you've made has no probative value on the statement "Walking through a forest during a storm is an easy way to get hurt or die."
I'm serious, when you walk in the forest, branches often fall and you need to look up and protect your head. That's why climbers wear construction helmets. And the situation in the video is quite dangerous. Therefore, always protect your head. I climbed to the top of a mountain of 800 meters and I know what it is.
While I agree there's nothing supernatural here, it is still pretty cool that over millions of years trees have developed this communal response to the hazards of wind and thin soil. Essentially this wave-like motion serves to efficiently dissipate harsh incoming wind energy in a non-destructive way, preventing catastrophic erosion failure of the landscape.
All in all a very cool biological and ecological adaptation.
Pedantic point of order: it's Macbeth, not MacBeth. "Macbeth" is his personal (first) name, not his patronymic. His father was Findláech mac Ruaidrí.
"Beth" means "life". (Gaelic "beathad", cognate to "uisce beatha", water of life, which gives us the word "whiskey"). His personal name means "son of life". (Not entirely unlike the Hebrew name Chaim, which means "life".)
Of course none of that is mentioned in the play. But Shakespeare did at least spell it right: "Macbeth".
It looks eerie but it is not uncommon for this to happen. It also means he should not have been in the forest since those root clumps will only withstand so much punishment before they tear loose and the trees start falling. It is not uncommon for people to get hurt/killed by falling trees in stormy forests. Even worse than root clumps with the trees still attached are clumps with stubs, i.e. when the trunk has been severed from the root. Those stand up invitingly but can snap shut at any moment like a man-eating Venus Fly trap.
Honestly not sure that there would have been any wildfires in this forest. It’s in Scotland where it is generally pretty wet and not prone to wildfires in forests.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadIf you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly in other places too. If you want to keep posting here, we'd appreciate it if you'd please fix that.
If the last figure accurately represents the proportion who died while outside (vs when trees crushed their homes or cars), it would seem that those ~13 people a year in the US track lower than deaths due to lightning strikes [2].
Personally I’d rather not be out in a storm any more than I’d want to swim during lightning, but in absolute terms it does seem to be a healthy three orders of magnitude safer than being in a car in the US (at ~37K direct fatalities annually [3]).
[0] https://weather.com/news/news/2021-05-11-falling-trees-durin...
[1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.45....
[2] https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-fatalities
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...
Like statistics are a bad way to evaluate risk if the risk is easily avoided. Not many people die from swimming in lava; it is still wrong to conclude jumping into lava is safe.
Absolute terms of being in a car measured this way don't make sense.
People in the US are exposed to tens of billions of hours of driving annually and probably low millions of hours of being in bad storm conditions in forests. (I don't know, do 1 out of 300 of us even spend an hour in that?)
This is like saying that because few people die from playing Russian roulette, it's not too big of a concern to play now and then.
The response you've made has no probative value on the statement "Walking through a forest during a storm is an easy way to get hurt or die."
and who would film it?
The trees are bending over in the wind and lifting up the roots and soil.
Just some trees with roots that don't go deep down.
> Arborists often recommend a tree protection zone with a radius of one foot for every one inch of trunk diameter — a 12 to 1 ratio.
https://www.deeproot.com/blog/blog-entries/how-wide-do-tree-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSpyGJRONfI
All in all a very cool biological and ecological adaptation.
"Beth" means "life". (Gaelic "beathad", cognate to "uisce beatha", water of life, which gives us the word "whiskey"). His personal name means "son of life". (Not entirely unlike the Hebrew name Chaim, which means "life".)
Of course none of that is mentioned in the play. But Shakespeare did at least spell it right: "Macbeth".
/end pedantry
Also an example of how damaged was the soil layer after the many wildfires that obviously happened in the past
Scotland is overgrazed (at least in some places) but they removed a lot of forest first.