Keeping up means a lot of catching up to keep from falling behind. My notes from December's AGU Fall Meeting (which I'm catching up with) remind me of an intriguing poster presentation from that meeting about ball lightning. This is a rare phenomenon in which atmospheric electricity appears to form glowing, sparkling spheres. Often it's associated with regular lightning but sometimes it's reported on clear days. Anyway, the poster pointed out that ball lightning strongly resembles the hallucinations that accompany epileptic seizures. Given that a significant fraction of people have such a seizure at least once in their lives, often without ever knowing it, uncorroborated reports of ball lightning need to be treated very carefully.
I noticed this because I think it also bears on the subject of earthquake lights, which also consist of unusual illuminations. Maybe the protocol for researching earthquake lights should include brain exams for witnesses. I tell you, if I ever witness such things, I'll have my head examined too, just to be sure.
Posters like this are easy to miss. I mean, where would you look in the meeting program? In this case, the poster was presented in the middle of a couple dozen others that were mostly related to sprite research. If I didn't have a long-standing interest in sprites, I'd have missed it completely.
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