Hailstones
I was a little perturbed when your paper, earlier in the spring, described hailstones that fell in a couple of Midwest storms as “baseball-sized” and “softball-sized”. You could as easily have used two California products, oranges and grapefruit, as measures of those hailstones’ size.
The report of a Chinese hailstorm (Times, May 23) is more disturbing. It describes the largest hailstones as weighing 1.5 kilograms, which your headline writer incorrectly converts to 3 pounds. Actually, a spherical 1.5-kilo hailstone would have a diameter of 5.6 inches, which could best be described by the phrase “as big as Imperial Valley cantaloupes.”
H.W. ANDERSON
La Jolla
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