The Thing That is Knot

The Washington Post this morning has a little guide to storm terms. The paragraph for "Knots" quotes the informant as saying

A nautical mile is one minute of latitude, so 50-knot winds is actually 90 miles per hour.

This estimate surprised me, for a nautical mile is not that much longer than a statute mile. But a bit of arithmetic suggests that the source said, or at least meant, "kilometers".

The other odd point in the the story is a quotation from Bob Dylan's song about the Titanic:

They battened down the hatches,
But the hatches wouldn't hold.

I doubt they did batten the hatches down, but I bet they would've held.