Something I will add is that it is highly fortunate that those earthquakes occurred where they did. They were all apparently fairly shallow (10 km). And had they occurred anywhere near populated areas we would still be digging bodies out of the rubble of collapsed cities.

My forecasting data indicate to me that there is a high probability that we could develop fairly good forecasting programs that would rely on GPS types of data plus information regarding past earthquakes. Information related to the positions of the sun and the moon in the sky could be added to make the programs even more accurate. They would not need any precursor data such as electromagnetic signal data though those types of data would improve program accuracy.

The computer programs could be easily developed. But it would require the use of one of those extremely fast and powerful government computers. This is because the programs would have to do optimization calculations for every fault zone in the world. And there are a lot of fault zones and a lot of past earthquakes to process.

Why aren’t governments doing that? The answer is that our government officials generally know virtually nothing about science. And their science advisors appear to me to be frequently mainly interested in collecting their paychecks rather than telling their bosses what actually needs to get done. “Look out for # 1” as the saying goes.

And if you think that I have spent a lot of time saying unkind things about the geology specialists over the years then you should hear what I have said during the past few years to elected U.S. officials, Social Security personnel, and private insurance company personnel regarding the U.S. Government’s Social Security and Medicare Web site programs. The insurance people have all said that my recommendations for improvements are great. But the government officials that I have personally met with and talked with have all just stood there, smiled, and shook their heads. It has literally been like talking to trees.

In any case, one of my top priority projects at this time is getting the U.S. to create a special new department that would help reduce the number of disasters that occur on a regular basis such as that current Medicare mess, the blown oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Japan nuclear power plant meltdown.

These are personal opinions.