Bits ‘n’ Pieces
    Easter Sunday is, in the Christian calendar, the most important festival of the year, more theologically significant than even Christmas.  In the secular world it isn’t celebrated quite as fervently, but since Western history was dominated by Christianity, Easter Sunday is still a widely observed event.
    For Christians, it symbolises Jesus’ atonement for the sins of mankind and the rebirth of humanity through Godly salvation.  Outside Christianity it’s all about chocolate, eggs and rabbits.  That's a weird combination of stuff though.  Jesus wasn't a rabbit.  Rabbits don't lay eggs (as far as I'm aware, I'm not a Biologist) and chicks don't eat chocolate.  I am confusion. 
    So, I’ve decided to write a blog about Easter and its cultural paraphernalia, largely because the school term has finished and I finally have time on my hands, but also because it's interesting to look at the history and Science behind these traditions.  Oh, and I might as well do the Science of chocolate while I'm at it.   

The Origins of Easter
    Let’s be clear about something first: Jesus of Nazareth absolutely existed and no self-respecting historian would claim otherwise.  Whether you believe Jesus to be a prophet, the Messiah or literally God himself is up to interpretaion.  What isn’t up to interpretation is whether he was real or not.  He was.  Get over it. 
    The influence of Christianity on Western culture over the past two millenia cannot be overstated either.  Even our dating system comes from the life of Jesus.  I mean, I just made reference to "two millenia".  Two millenia since what?  The birth of Jesus...duh.  
    We get our concept of a yearly date from a Romanian monk named Dionysius Exiguus who calculated Jesus’ birth as happening 753 years after the founding of Rome.  This year was obviously the most important in history so it was called year zero.   Anything before then was BC (Before Christ) while everything after became AD (from the Latin Anno Domini…year of the lord). 
    However, Exiguus screwed up.  The gospel of Matthew (Matt 2:1) records that Jesus was born “in the days of Herod the King”.  This is a reference to Herod the first, who died 749 years after the founding of Rome - making the date 4 B.C.  Furthermore, the gospel of Luke (Luke 2:1) tells us Jesus was born “when Quirinius was governor of Syria”.  Quirinius occupied this post from 6 - 4 BC, so if Jesus was born during the lives of both men, he must have been born six to four years before Christ.  Nice going Exiguus.
    The date of Jesus’ execution is a little easier to pin down though.  The gospel of John (John 2: 20) tells us Jesus first visited Jerusalem in the 46th year after the Temple started construction.  We know Herod began this project in 19 BC, so that places the date as 27 AD.  We are then told that three years passed before he was crucified (John 2:13, John 5:1, John 12:12), making the final year of his life 29 AD. 
    The gospel of Luke however refers to Jesus first visiting Jerusalem in “the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Ceasar” (Luke 3:1) which was 29 AD - the year John records him dying.  Fortunately, the three synoptic gospels record the time between Jesus’ visit to Jerusalem and crucifixion as  one week (not three years) so all four gospels agree on the date of death, even if they disagree on the rest of his timeline.
    We are also told the crucifixion took place on “the day of preparation” (Matt 27:63) a reference to the Jewish week.  In Judaism, Saturday or Shabbat is considered the final day of the week (Sunday is the first) and it is a day of rest and religious contemplation.  The day before is the “day of preparation” for Shabbat, meaning the crucifixion took place on a Friday.  Jesus’ resurrection is reported to have happened two days after the crucifixion, making it Sunday morning.  The early Christians decided Sunday was therefore a more appropriate holy day and made Monday the start of their week instead. 
    And in case you’re curious, in 1988 the International Organization of Standardisation decided Monday was officially the first day of the week, going with Christian custom rather than Jewish.  What a fun meeting that must have been. 
    Jesus was in Jerusalem to celebrate passover which, in 29 AD, took place on Monday the 18th of April.  We know he celebrated this passover with his disciples, so the crucifixion must have occured the following Friday, making the date of his resurrection April 25th.  But Easter’s date moves every year!  This year it's happening on April 1st.  Next year it will be April 21st and last year it was April 16th.  Why is Easter, quite literally, a movable feast?

Look to the Moon
    The Babylonians based their yearly calendar on the moon’s phases.  Every twelve lunar cycles was a regeneration of the twelve signs of the Zodiac so the year was split into twelve “moonths” or “months”.  The Egyptians however marked their year after the four seasons giving us a 365 day repetition.  They didn't know about the solar system, but their calendar was inadvertantly based on Earth’s orbit of the Sun. 
    This gave us two rival calendars being used in 1st century Judea; the lunar and the solar, and they do not sync-up.  The Jewish calendar has the feast of Passover fixed on the 15th day of the month of Nisan based on the Moon-calendar and since the Chrisitian church was originally comprised of Jewish and Greek people, their date for Easter was fixed according to the lunar system.  But from the perspective of the Romans (who adopted the Egyptian Sun-calendar) Easter moved back and forth iwith the moon's phase. 
    Since the Roman empire eventually conquered most of the Western world, it was their Sun-calendar which won out and we now mark a year as the time taken for a solar orbit.  By contrast Christmas, a festival introduced centuries later, has a fixed point in the solar year (December 25th) but oscillates from the perspective of the Jewish calendar.
    The name “Easter” arose in 7th Century Germany, from the Goddess Eoster, a deity associated with spring and fertility whose feast was celebrated in April.  The name Eoster seems to come from an even older German word Austro which means “shine”.  This is most likely where we get the word “East” because it's the place where the Sun begins to shine every morning - an obvious symbol of new life.
    Oh, and during the 12th Century, the word good also meant “Holy” so the Friday of Jesus’ crucifixion - originally called Holy Friday - came to be called Good Friday.  Just in case you were wondering why it was a "good" thing Jesus was brutally tortured and executed.

So where do eggs and rabbits come in?
    Easter eggs are, surprisingly, one of the oldest Christian traditions, possibly as old as communion itself.  Eggs have always been a symbol of new life, particularly around the Spring season.  The early Christians began painting eggs red to symbolise the blood of Jesus and as time marched on the decorations became more elaborate until egg-painting became a staple part of Easter fun.  The rabbit connection however gets a bit weird. 
    Rabbits are notoriously hard to tell their sexes apart.  Males and females both have small genitals which look similar, even on close inspection.  For centuries, people believed rabbits were simultaneously male and female meaning they could have sex with themselves and induce “virgin birth” thus becoming associated with the Virgin Mary.

There.  That’s a fact you now know.  

    During the sixth century Chinese artwork also featured a lot of rabbit images (nobody knows why) and it was adopted by the Romans, so when they converted to Christianity they brought rabbits along and at some point, the rabbit became tied specifically to Easter.
    That seems to have begun in 17th century Germany where The Easter Hare served a similar function to Santa Claus - punishing naughty children and rewarding good ones on the night before Easter.  My guess is that Christmas already had a winter-spirit so the rabbit was picked as his spring equivalent.  And since colourful eggs were a big part of Easter already, it made sense for these to be the Easter Hare's gifts. 

Right, now that we’ve done rabbit genitals, let's talk about chocolate.

What is chocolate?
    To get chocolate you start by picking fruit of the Theobroma cacao tree which tends to grow in South America.  When you open the fruit you’ll find white seeds which you have to ferment with a fungus called aspergillus. 
    Once the cacao seeds have been digested, you remove the shells, grind them up and heat the whole thing.  A thick brown paste forms which separates into cocoa powder (a brown solid) and cocoa butter (a white wax).
    People of the Inca and later Aztec empires would often use both ingredients as stock for various drinks, sometimes mixed with chilli powder, giving rise to an early form of what we call hot chocolate.  When the Spanish invaders landed they took the recipe home and began adding sugar, honey and vanilla to soften the bitter taste. 
    Chocolate drinks became very popular throughout Europe over the next hundred years.  So popular in fact that in 1662 Pope Alexander VII sanctioned the consumption of chocolate during lent saying that chocolate did not count as breaking your fast.  Thus, chocolate became associated with Easter.
    It wasn’t until 1847 that the confectioner Joseph Fry perfected a way to solidify the chocolate drink into a bar.  By a careful process of churning and cooling slowly, Fry was able to prevent cocoa crystals forming (which made things brittle) and generated lumps of sweet brown matter with a similar consistency to soap. 
    Fry’s company marketed three types of chocolate bar: milk chocolate which contained cocoa powder, butter and sugar; white chocolate which contained only cocoa butter and sugar; and dark chocolate which contained the cocoa ingredients and no sugar. 
    Then in 1873, Fry decided to capitalise on the significance of eggs during the Easter season and began making chocolate eggs instead of bars.  Originally a solid piece of chocolate, this became the infamous Easter egg.  

    
    Chocolate has since become the most widely consumed confectionary product in the world and, like anything popular, this has led to innumerable myths and pseudofacts.  To finish, let’s take a brief look at some of the more famous chocolate myths and seperate the powder from the butter.

Is chocolate really poisonous to dogs?
    Yes.  Chocolate contains a chemical called theobromine which is poisonous to most animals so it has to get broken down once it’s inside you.  Dogs break it down very slowly however, so theobromine can reach toxic levels for them very quickly.  A big dog eating a small bar should be fine, but a small dog eating a large bar is at serious risk. 
    Technically, theobromine is poisonous to humans as well, we’re just good at breaking it down before it does damage.  You’d have to eat around 40 kilograms of milk chocolate in 24 hours to reach toxic levels.  Bearing in mind a standard bar of chocolate weighs 40 grams, this is a thousand bars in a day.  You're probably safer than your dog.

Is chocolate addictive?
    Yes and no, depending on what you mean by addictive.  When we talk about addiction we usually mean a person doesn’t just like a particular substance...they feel unable to function without it.  The boundary gets a little hazy because you could argue that some people cannot function unless they get the thing they want i.e. they need it.  The debate gets even more complicated because addiction has many causes, most of which are poorly understood. 
    For example, one suspected mechanism is that the body can start using the ingested chemical as a substitute for chemicals it normally produces itself.  Over time the body stops producing its own supply and when you stop taking the drug you find your body lacking something.  Thus, you get withdrawal symptoms.  It’s suspected that opioid addiction works along these lines.
    This kind of addiction is usually termed "physical addiction" because it has a measurable impact on the body's biochemistry.  By contrast, there is the so-called “psychological addiction” where the chemical doesn’t necessarily alter the biology but you find yourself dependent nonetheless.
    What is speculated to happen is that certain chemicals cause a rise in dopamine - a neurotransmitter associated with happiness.  To prevent your body getting overloaded with dopamine (which would lead to schizophrenia), the body increases production of enzymes to break the dopamine down. 
    The more you take the drug, the more efficient your body gets at producing the enzymes and you find the drug becomes less and less effective over time.  This is building up a tolerance.  As a result, you find yourself needing to use more and more to get the desired effects which (unbenknownst to you) leads to an increase in the amount of enzymes as well. 
    When you finally stop taking the drug your body is still producing the enzymes in large amounts, but you’ve stopped boosting your dopamine.  All your naturally-produced dopamine gets destroyed and you get cravings, insecurity and sometimes depression. 
    Chocolate can cause a very small surge in dopamine so it is definitely possible to become psychologically addicted to it.  There are certainly reports of people who become so dependent on chocolate they don’t feel comfortable without eating it...would we therefore say they are unable to function?  
    Harsh critics might say these people need to use willpower to quit whatever they have become dependent on.  While others might point out that addiction to chocolate can be just like addiction to any other chemical.  The terminology is ill-defined but the take-home message is that even when a particular food or drug is described as “non-addictive”, that only means it’s not phsyically addictive.  You can still become addicted to it.  So be careful folks.

Wasn’t there a study which proved chocolate helps you lose weight?
    No.  Although it certainly seemed like it when Johannes Bohannon made global headlines in 2015, claiming to have found a link between chocolate and weight loss.  As interesting as this news story was, things were not as they seemed.  Johannes Bohannon (known by his real name Dr John Bohannon of both Oxford and Harvard University) was actually carrying out a subtle experiment, not on chocolate but on the media.  He wanted to see how carefully newspapers, magazines and websites would check a Scientific study before reporting it, so he decided to perform a deliberately terrible experiment and see how many outlets would pick it up.
    The trick he used was to carry out his experiment on a small number of people (15) and look at dozens of changes to their bodies.  By measuring all sorts of things he was able to find a link purely by coincidence.  A technique called "p-value manipulation".
     Imagine I gave three people a pill and asked them how they feel.  Let’s say by coincidence all three of them have good days at work.  I could then claim “this pill makes you have a good day at work”  Or if, by a different coincidence all three people happened to sneeze a lot, I could claim “this pill makes you sneeze”. 
    If you keep asking people for information you’ll find a pattern eventually and it just so happened that the 15 people in Bohannon’s study all lost a tiny bit of weight, so that was the outcome reported. 
    Bohannan also decided to break with scientific protocol and went straight to the media with his claim, rather than getting other scientists to peer review the article first.  A lot of reporters seized on the story because it sounded amazing and the study exploded.
     Bohannon’s experiment teaches us several things.  First: when a Scientist is doing an experiment they should have a clear view of what result they’re measuring i.e. don’t keep looking for results until you find them (because you always will).  Second: just because the words “a study has shown…” are used in a report doesn’t mean that study was a good one.  And perhaps most importantly, when you hear a headline about a Scientific discovery, check to see what other Scientists think.

Does Chocolate Cause Bad Skin?
    No.  This one’s a very popular factoid but it seems to be completely untrue.  Many studies have been conducted on the impact of chocolate on human skin and none have found a link.  If you have a sudden rash on your skin, there are lots of things which could be causing it, but it's not chocolate.  My guess is that there's something a lot less dramatic going on.
   One thing which is known to cause bad skin is stress and when you’re under a lot of stress the body produces cortisol which gives you bad skin.  People also tend to manage stress by eating high caloric foods e.g. chocolate so I propose that stress causes both overeating chocolate and bad skin, leading to a misattribution of cause and effect.  Any thoughts?

And finally...is chocolate an aphrodisiac?
    No.  Chocolate contains small amounts of tryptophan which the body can turn into serotonin, a chemical often produced when people fall in love.  The claim runs that consuming large amounts of chocolate therefore causes amorous feelings.  But the amounts contained in a bar are vanishingly small; far less than in a leg of turkey or a glass of milk which are not usually associated with hanky-panky behaviour.  I suspect chocolate simply tastes nice so people give it to loved ones on special occasions (eg Valentine’s day) when amorous feelings are already on the table. 
    Is it theoretically possible to consume so much chocolate it becomes a subsitute for romance and sexual thrill though?  I guess technically yes, but you’d have to eat crate-loads of the stuff and as we’ve already seen, that will kill you before you fall in love.  If you want to feel all loved up you’re better off watching Titanic rather than dying.  And if you don’t like Titatnic you’re probably dead inside already.

Happy Easter Folks!


Image Credits
Easter Egg: Leicestershirediabetes
Easter Bunny Boomerang: deviantart
Christian Bale as Jesus: fanpop
Robert Powell as Jesus: rejesus
Mary Painting: apollo-magazine
Three Hares: Chinesepuzzles
Fry's chocolate: flickr
Willywonka: denofgeek
Scary Easter Bunny: YouTube
Chocolate Cancer: Twitter
Chocolate Skin: nowloss
Titanic: grantland

What are the odds?
    As it says on the above DVD cover for Die Hard 2...Die Harder (sweet mother of mercy) lightning shouldn't strike twice.  It's an expression we use to mean "astonishing events don't occur on repeat".  The odds of something unusual happening are small, so the chances of an unusual thing happening more than once should be even rarer...right?
    Well, not quite.  While a rare occurence is by definition uncommon, if you run your observations for a longer period of time the chances of it happening more than once don't change.  Suppose the odds of you finding a four-leafed clover are 1 in 50.  If you go looking at clover-leafs 50 times you'll probably find a four-leafer.  That's rare.  But if you look at clover leafs another 50 times you'll probably find a second one because now you've made the odds 2/100, which is exactly the same as 1/50.  The chances of a rare event happening don't necessarily diminish, they can actually stay the same.
    There's also the fact that the more people involved in "experiencing events" i.e. living on planet Earth, the more chance you have of one person experiencing several remarkable occurences.  For example, Florida resident James Bozeman won his state lottery two years running in 2012 and 2013.  Harry Black of British Columbia bought two winning lottery tickets in the same lottery also in 2013, and then there's Joan Ginther who won the Texas state lottery four times in 1993, 2006, 2008 and 2010. 
    Ginther's case is fascinating because after winning $5.4 million in 1993, she was still playing the lottery 13 years later.  And her method was remarkable: she just bought tens of thousands of tickets for each lottery, spending her winnings from the previous lottery on winning the next.  That might be more to do with compulsive behaviour than luck admittedly, but it's still pretty interesting.  It also demonstrates that our ability to grasp probability is not intuitive.
    When a rare thing happens to you, you get spooked.  But rare things have got to happen to someone.  I once saw a person dropping a glass of drink onto a hardwood floor.  The glass inverted perfectly, landed over the drink and caught it upside down without spiling a drop.  The drink was now resting on the floor with the liquid trapped inside and no damage to the glass. 
    The odds of that are astonishing, but when you consider the sheer number of people having drinks and knocking them over all over the world for the last few centuries, chances are it probably happened on several occasions.  Even if something is a one in a million chance, if a billion people are involved that means it will happen a thousand times.  One in a million chances are not actually very rare.
    One of my favourite psychological experiments on probability was carried out by Richard Dawkins in his Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (1991).  Dawkins instructed every member of his audience to stand up and told the left half of the room to think "heads" while the right half thought "tails".  He then flipped a coin and half the room sat down because they had failed to predict the outcome.  Then he repeated it with the remaining half, some of them focusing on heads, some on tails. 
    He did this again and again until only one person was left standing; someone who had accurately predicted/psychically influenced the coin a dozen times in a row.  That person was no doubt thinking "what are the odds that every time I visualised a particular outcome it came true?" but Dawkins pointed out something crucial.  By pure chance, a small number of people will always end up beating the odds.  One person genuinely did get 12/12 predictions correct but you have to remember that 200 people in the room didn't get this accuracy. I guess you could call his experiment an example of COIN...cidence.

It shouldn't happen, but it does
    So, what about lightning?  Does it strike twice?  Well, there are certainly people who have been struck on multiple occasions.  The all-time champ is undoubtedly Roy Sullivan (pictured below) who was struck six times during his 80-year lifespan.  He also claims to have been struck once as a child (although this one wasn't documented).  Even Sullivan's wife was hit, presumably because the lightning missed its target. 
    The odds of this happening to one person are slim.  According to Marry Anne Cooper, a lightning-researcher at the University of Illinois (probably the most badass job imaginable), the odds of you getting hit by lightning once in your life are about 1/3000.  Sullivan's numbers seem inexplicable, but then again he was a park ranger in Virginia, a state which gets a lot of lightning, and he spent a lot of his time outdoors looking for people who got lost in storms. 
    So it would appear that lightning can hit a person more than once by pure chance, but can it hit the same location on the Earth's surface?  Is the safest place to be during a thunderstorm right where you saw it strike a few moments ago?  Let's look at the Science.      

What is lightning anyway?
    When two objects rub against each other they can break each other’s atoms, chipping off electrons in the process.  These electrons get transferred from one surface to the other and a precarious charge imbalance has been created.  One of the objects now has an excess of electrons and they will try to escape their unstable surface, usually by tunnelling into the Earth itself. 
    Because Earth is enormous it has room for surplus particles, so electrons sitting unhappily on the surface of an object will zap toward the ground, going through anything that’s in the way, including you.
    That’s what causes the static shock people get after brushing their hair.  Strands of human hair pick up electrons from the brush and as soon as you touch something connected to the ground they jump across, creating a spark in the process.  A lightning bolt is the same thing multiplied millions of times...we think.
    The problem with lightning is that it’s an unpredictable and dangerous phenomenon, which makes it very hard to study.  We know it happens more in warm countries and it tends to occur during rainstorms, but that's all we're certain about.  Please take the remainder of this explanation as speculative.  It's a little more than a hypothesis, but it's not quite strong enough to be called a theory yet and there are plenty of meteorologists who disagree. 
    Lightning is largely thought to be the result of rain and dust blowing around inside a cloud, causing electrons to hop around and accumulate in one region, like they do between strands of hair.  Once a big enough charge build-up has accumulated, things get unstable and rivers of electrical energy start leaking out like tentacles seeking a quick route to gain stability.  These ribbons of charge go darting outward from the cloud and we call them lightning bolts - although you’ve probably never seen one because they're very faint.  What you usually see during a storm is the result of lightning simultaneously coming up from the ground toward the sky.  Strange as that might sound.
    The electrically charged part of a cloud has the ability to ‘sniff out’ a path toward an oppositely charged object, typically the Earth.  This scout party is called a “leader” but for reasons not understood, the Earth begins doing the same; sending a bunch of positive charge upward in its own quest to be neutralised.  These upward-lightning bolts are called “streamers”.
    The two threads of opposite-charge snake through the air and meet like the hand of God touching Adam in the Sistine chapel.  At the instant of connection, a flow of electricity occurs between ground and sky and it’s this linking of leader and streamer your eyes actually see - what's called the "flash".  Fun fact: lightning in a snowstorm appears green and pink.  Nobody knows why. 

This kind of thunder
    Often, lightning flashes occur between two clouds, one creating the leader and the other creating the streamer.  But when this happens between cloud and ground it's referred to as a lightning "strike". 
    Strikes are about 10 kilometres long and while you don’t want to get caught inside one, the effects are rarely lethal.  They can carry up to 30,000 amps (more than enough to kill) but the bolt passes through your body in a fraction of a second so the effects aren’t sustained long enough to be lethal, only to burn horribly, creating intricate injuries called Lichtenberg scars.
    The temperature of a lightning strike is also pretty extreme, around 30,000 degrees Celsius - five times hotter than the surface of the Sun.  It has been known for this temperature to boil the water inside trees and cause them to literally explode, so lightning is far more likely to blow you up than electrocute you. 
    That heat also causes the surrounding air to expand rapidly.  This creates a shockwave in the atmosphere which goes travelling outwards from the lightning like a sonic boom.  This is the thunder you hear shortly after seeing the flash. 
     Although if you are unfortunate enought to get hit, your chances are pretty good.  90% of people struck by lightning survive and although it can cause siezures, chronic fatige and in the worst cases blindness and brain-damage, most people struck by lightning have little memory of it other than seeing a bright flash, falling unconscious and waking with a splitting headache. 

Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!
   One of the most fascinating versions of lightning known to exist is the so-called "ball lightning" ...although its name in German is krugelblitz which is obviously better.  For many centuries, the phenomenon of krugelblitz was thought to be a tall-tale (a ball-tale?  Anyone?  No?), but it turns out to be a genuine occurence. 
    Although shockingly rare and without any explanation whatsoever, lightning can sometimes wrap itself up into a ball and go darting around through the air like a maniacal fairy.  I love krugelblitz because it's one of those things where we have absolutely no clue what's going on.  Just that it happens.  Here's what is believed to be the first photograph of ball-lightning, taken by a lucky bystander in China.

So does it strike the same place twice?
    The answer is emphatically yes.  All the time in fact.  At any given moment there are around 2,000 thunderstorms on Earth with about 100 flashes per second.  It's estimated about half of these are strikes so roughly 50 bolts of lightning will hit the earth during the time it takes you to read this word: krugelblitz.
    Where does it tend to hit?  Well, the charged leaders are trying to reach Earth via the quickest route possible which usually means striking the tallest object around.  Since that doesn’t normally change (unless King Kong is in the neighborhood) most lightning tends to strike the same spots over and over.
    The Empire State Building for instance, is struck by lightning once every two weeks, as are many other tall buildings.  The iron in their shell is an excellent conductor and streamers can easily form from their spires (as in the picture below). 
    Also, while central Africa holds some of the records for most lightning strikes in a single year, the town of Lakeland, Florida gets hit once every three days, holding the record for the most lightning-prone place on Earth.  So actually, if you know a place has been struck by lightning recently, don’t assume that place is safe.  Assume the opposite. 
    We do have to be careful though and address a common lightning myth: that lightning will only strike the tallest object around.  It's more accurate to say lightning has a preference for it.  Well...that's not accurate at all because lightning isn't conscious and doesn't have feelings but you get what I mean.
    Lightning leaders (the ones going from cloud to ground) move in random jumps, each having a maximum range of about 45 meters.  So if a bolt of lightning is about to strike a building and you’re 46 meters away you’re probably safe.  But if you’re within the 45 meter danger zone, there is a chance the lightning might change its mind at the last minute and snap out to get you.  It’s rare to deviate but technically lightning can strike anything it wants.

But where shall I go?  What shall I do?"
    If you're standing in the middle of a thunderstorm and your hair starts pointing upwards I have some bad news for you.  An upward streamer is about to form around you.  Your hair is standing on end because you’re building positive charge and you’re about to get hit.  You need to act quickly.  Firstly and most importantly, finish reading my blog (priorities).  Then you've got to make yourself lightning-invisible. 
    Oh, and don’t waste time putting on rubber-soled shoes.  A bolt of lightning packs around a hundred million volts.  You think an inch of rubber is going to stop it?  Think again.  It’s going to tear through you and your shoes like a bullet through tissue paper.  Your best bet is to surround yourself with metal, usually by getting inside a car or a metal building.  That sounds counter-intuitive but it’s completely logical.
     Electricity wants to get to the ground through the path of least resistance.  The metal bodywork of a car is much easier to travel through than a human body so given the choice, electricity won’t even glance at you and will stay inside the metallic shield you’ve surrounded yourself with.  The bolt will travel through the roof of the car, down the doors, through the rubber wheels (often melting them in the process) and straight into the ground.  In the picture below, from George Westinghouse's 1941 electricity experiments, you can actually see artificial lightning striking the top of a car and  coming out near the front left wheel, leaving the occupant unharmed.

   Although some electrons might briefly tickle their way through the air toward your body, they find it so difficult they usually just go back to the metal and carry on.  So, while the worst place to be during a storm is near a skyscraper (in case it changes course) one of the best places to be is directly inside it.  Same with planes.  In fact, if you've ever been inside an aeroplane, chances are it was struck by lightning at some point during your journey.  Pretty cool, right?

An Urban Legend...which is actually true
    So, in summary, rare events can occur to the same person multiple times, even on the same day.  Lightning is a mysterious phenomenon but we know it can strike the same person twice and often prefers to strike the same location.  The best place to be during a strike is either inside a metal cage or far away from anything tall.  But if it does hit you, you're probably going to be ok. 
    To finish with I can't help but recant a morbid, albeit fascinating story you may have run across.  Have you ever heard the tale of the woman who allegedly got killed by lightning because the electricity conducted through the underwire of her bra and her breasts were so big that all that metal killed her?  I heard that story on the school playground years ago and assumed it was an urban legend.  But it's not.
    It happened on 22nd September 1999 in Hyde Park, London.  The two unfortunate women were named Anuban Bell (24) and Sunnee Whitworth (39).  What's more, the coroner Paul Knapman claims he had seen it happen once before.  Knapman had, at the time, been the coroner on some 50,000 cases making death by underwire bra-lightning a 1 in 25,000 chance.  That does mean  technically, technically, if you have large breasts (and therefore more underwire) you have a slightly higher chance of getting killed by lightning.  Sorry about that.
    Obviously that all seems horrible and a rather grim place to finish the blog.  If only there was a way to cheer people up after reading such horrifying news.  If only a great rock band had recorded a song about lightning to lift people's spirits.  And no, I am not talking about Thunder by Imagine Dragons (no offence to my ID fans out there).  I'm clearly talking about AC/DC.  If only they had recorded a song about thunderstorms.  If only...

Image credits
Die Hard 2: Amazon
Richard Dawkins: TheNextWeb
Roy Sullivan: Wikipedia
Streamer: youtube
Leader: videoblocks
Dinosaur Lightning: Wikipedia
Ball Lightning: io9
Building Streamer: drroyspencer
Empire State: architecuraldigest
Car Test: scienceservices
Airplane: quora