re: #288 Sherlock Hound

After the big explosion in Tianjin a few years ago, people have to relearn about shock waves. If I see an explosion like that out of my window, I’m hitting the deck! There was one video of the Tianjin explosion captured via a Chinese video streaming service. When the last, big, explosion happened, the person recording the video was already dead. They were that close to the explosion.

And speaking of shock waves: in those videos of the Beirut explosion, the big blast caused what looked like an near-spherical, opaque white cloud, which almost immediately dissipated with the (?) shock wave (?).
Can a science-savvy Lizard explain that cloud? I’m sure it’s some easily-explicable phenomenon: it just looked very weird….