The point of this study is to supplament previous studies of ball lightning. The most widely accepted theory is that ball lightning is a ball of silicon gas, resulting from lightning striking the ground. That obviously didn't address the cases of ball lightning appearing in and around aircraft, which is the gap this study fills in.
So now it seems we have one workable theory of ball lightning. To claim it is incomplete, you need to find cases of ball lightning that were both a significant distance away from the ground AND far, far away from any windows.
My doubts about this theory lie in the various behaviors when ball lightning encouters solid objects... Sometimes it burns a hole, while other times witnesses claim it passed right through solid objects without causing any damage. That seems to indicate there may be two very different types of ball lightning, but perhaps the ground versus windows source will prove to generate a sufficiently different type of ball which will suit both observations.
With "skeptic" in the name, I was expecting much, much better. It's a pretty bland application of some rule-of-thumb (perhaps, dogmatic) beliefs about tooth decay, which doesn't hold up to reality.
One of the problems which comes to mind is that mouth wash has NEVER proven effective in preventing tooth decay (and companies that make Scope, Listerene and others would really LOVE to be able to say that it does). Meanwhile, this article blindly asserts that they will work quite well.
This issue throws every other claim into doubt, too, since the bacteria is claimed be be the sole cause of decay, and a mouth wash certainly could kill-off bacteria in the mouth. It seems tooth decay is a far more complex activity than the model used in this discussion.
The minidisc was a great technology at the time, but it's probably for the best that it didn't catch on. Minidiscs used lossy encoding, so ripping your MDs to MP3s would sound pretty bad. And these days, hard drives or flash storage is far superior. What would have been nice is if DVDs and Blu-Ray adopted the MiniDisc form factor... Scratch-free movies from Netflix, in a tiny package that's far quicker and easier to handle.
So now it seems we have one workable theory of ball lightning. To claim it is incomplete, you need to find cases of ball lightning that were both a significant distance away from the ground AND far, far away from any windows.
My doubts about this theory lie in the various behaviors when ball lightning encouters solid objects... Sometimes it burns a hole, while other times witnesses claim it passed right through solid objects without causing any damage. That seems to indicate there may be two very different types of ball lightning, but perhaps the ground versus windows source will prove to generate a sufficiently different type of ball which will suit both observations.