We often forget that major historical events were not instantanous with neat summaries and conclusions. They were messy and evolved. It took time to absorb what happened and make sense of it – especially tragedies.

Enter a quiet trend of re-living things in real-time. Some examples I’ve run across were NASA’s realtime Apollo lunar landing missions. Another, even more somber, would be the sinking of the Titanic. I think it’s important to realize that the sinking happened at 2am when people were asleep and were caught off guard. It only took 2 hours and 40 minutes from being fine to the deaths of the majority of the passengers. Experiencing it in realtime was surprising to me. It’s amazing how just about nothing seems really bad until the very end – something that financial markets often mimic. The signs of trouble are there for a long time before a very quick, shockingly violent end.