I am back from my annual vacation in beautiful southwestern Ontario. Check out this shot I took with my Windows Phone camera from the plane on the trip home. We are at 37000 feet, just outside of Billings, Montana, a few minutes before sunset:

The whole thing was chock full of immense lightning arcs which unfortunately I did not capture in the image. This is certainly the largest isolated thunderstorm I’ve ever seen from the outside. Notice the characteristic anvil shape; as I’ve described before, we’ve got a huge heat engine here that is extracting the latent heat from the gaseous and liquid water, and then using that heat to power the updraft that sucks more warm water vapor upwards. Quite beautiful.

Next time on FAIC: Out parameters and LINQ do not mix.