Did philosophy extinguish myth?
A lightning rod, sometimes called a lightning arrester is something you mount on top of your house. It is a pointed long metal rod (or several of them) that is mounted on the roof so that it is the highest object. It is connected via a heavy metal cable to a ground rod which is driven into the ground nearby. It will attract any lightning bolt and dissipate it to ground. You may be talking about a surge protector, an electronic device usually mounted in outlet strips, that provides protection to voltage surges and spikes, which can be caused by a nearby lightning strike, or by inductive loads switching off. Surge protectors are usually varistors, which are power devices that have an V-I characteristic that causes them to shunt voltage much above the normal line voltage to ground.
A simple smoke detector that takes a battery does not have to be wired in. I would however attach it to the wall. They usually come with two screws to attach it to the wall. That simple.
Columbia crashed in broad daylight, in bright blue skies. I actually know what it is - somebody taking a picture of a moving light dot (an airplane) with a hand-held camera, and struggling to keep it in the frame during the long exposure. And couple more random thoughts: how do you know corkscrew is merging with the trail and not emergin from it? Maybe it is just a first piece of debris falling off the shuttle? Lightning strikes planes all the time, and does not damage b/c of all the safety features they have. Surely they have same features on the shuttle. Finally, corkscrew does not look like lightning - the angles are too smooth, and different parts have different brightness.
