When a nuke explodes, x-rays escape the container long before the container itself is destroyed--for some definitions of "long before." They ionize air outside, and when the air de-excites it glows. The post shows 2 pictures taken a millionth of a second apart, with air glowing outside the bomb's casing.
The next post on that blog consists of only a title, "It's Late," with a number of comments by his wife added in the months and years after the author's death shortly after that last post.
A blog is a curious sort of legacy. It may be a collection of (maybe) interesting tidbits, old news, a diary, one part of a long conversation, maybe a few analyses mixed in that might be useful standalone...
I started writing this one intending to follow the denBeste model--concentrating on original content, and not so much the Instapundit model of links with brief comments. You can see for yourself how that worked out. I wonder how long it would take to sift through and collect those things I think might be useful for a longer while. I spent time on analyses that subsequent events have rendered moot. Was it worth doing? Maybe only for my own effort to be "an exact man" ...
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Blogging operates in two time-frames. It lasts forever - well, for years, anyway, even though photographs disappear - and old material can easily be brought forward. It exists automatically in archive form, much more than Twitter/Facebook, email, paper publishing, or personal correspondence. Yet its immediacy is part of its value. I don't come over to check out what were the smartest things James ever said, but to learn what James is thinking about today. It is also a sort of conversation.
I am not planning on stopping blogging any time soon and am not facing any imminent death that I am aware of. Yet I am often morbid in thought, worrying about death since I was twelve, and I have wondered more than once if a particular one of my 6200 posts was going to be my last. I have entered on a project of publishing all the saved bookmarks in one of my folders, and have also just completed a review of all my posts to see which are the most-viewed, with an eye to publishing those in a list. Those are the sort of summing-up activities that lead one to thinking about legacy. Yet they also destroy legacy. The latter project in particular, if I put out a list of 100 of my most popular, will then forever be the main, and perhaps only place anyone would check out after I am gone. A friend or descendant might, once in their further lifetime, decide to remember me by reading me at Assistant Village Idiot. They would likely go to that list, which then becomes the summation of the whole site. More rarely, a handful of people might remember a particular post and come looking for it on the blog's search engine, knowing that they could not email me to ask anymore.
Summing up seems like superstitiously inviting death.
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