earthquake

We had an earthquake about an hour ago, 4.5 and fairly near my house. I was in the attic, and after the shaking ended (it only went on for a few seconds), I thought 1) I should go downstairs and see how the cats were, and 2) I should put on some pants in case there was more to come and I would have to run outside.

It's the modern world, so everyone quickly goes to Twitter and posts something about how they felt it. Twitter is always good when something is happening ... you get a real-time sense of things. But when I went downstairs, for some reason I decided to turn on the local TV news to see what they were saying.

It was the darnedest thing. The anchors were sitting at their desk with their laptops open. The woman also had her phone and was checking it and telling us what she was learning. This is apparently what TV news has become: pictures of reporters looking at Twitter on their phones.

It got better. People were sending photos of the stuff that fell off shelves, things like that. The guy figures we should see these photos ... it's news! But it was really low tech. He would turn his laptop around so it was facing the camera, the camera would zoom in, and we would look at the picture.

Here is the coolest thing. Turns out there is a website, Quake Prediction. They posted this picture ... hard to tell for sure, I think it was yesterday:

Not bad at all.