Hi Shan, Thanks for the comments.

I have stated repeatedly to Petra in particular and other earthquake forecasters in general that I feel that the science of forecasting earthquakes could be regarded as being 1% science and 99% politics. And because of that many promising forecasting procedures are not being developed and used. They cannot get past the politics part.

This appears to me to be true for the Ear Tone research, and also unfortunately, for your sun shadow based forecasting method. It is not the technology which is holding you back but rather the political problems. And to be successful it is important to recognize them and deal with them.

Politics is also the most important limitation with my own forecasting procedure. And a good part of my effort for quite some time has been oriented towards dealing with that problem. And it appears that this approach is becoming increasingly successful. For example,

One technical problem with the procedure I have developed relates to the fact that there are no computer programs which directly generate the necessary types of data. I have to link various programs together and have them work with one another’s data.

In a recent note in the Newsgroups I asked if there are any commercial software groups interested in discussing the possibility of developing software which would be specifically designed to generate those types of data. And when I checked the Newsgroups earlier today I found that one software development group in another country had responded to my question.

With regard to your procedure I have recommended to quite a few groups and governments that they do some research on it. In one case a fairly high-ranking official working for another government passed my recommendation along to his main government research group with his personal recommendation that the matter be given some attention. And he had some strong influence with those people. But, nothing happened as far as I am aware.

As I proposed, if you wish to make some progress with your forecasting procedure I think that you are going to have to identify the particular political problems which are holding your method back and then deal with them. I myself keep recommending it to people for research. But not much has gotten done so far.