I noticed tonight that when Sacramento television reported the strong
earthquake in the Central Valley near Stockton at 15:55 local time, it
reported the epicenter as 11 kilometers (unfortunately with the accent on
the antepenault) WSW of Farmington.
It would seem odd that the land distance would be reported in kilometers,
except that the source was stated to be the U.S.G.S., which reports all
earthquake data in metric units.
The TV report in metric fits in with my theory that the news is so
overwhelmed these days that the anchorman took simply what he had in hand.
I suspect that later reports will probably be "dumbed down" into miles.
On occasion I have heard some meteorologists try to do a dumbed-down
conversion to obsolescent units on the fly, but this anchorman didn't.
He looked pretty confused. I'm not sure that he even knew what a
kilometer is or, for that matter, an earthquake!
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