Some of what was said tickled my funny bone because honestly, most people are horrible at paying attention to details. I'm a detail nut. That comes from years of being an investigator. I hear everything. If someone calls me on the telephone I can tell a lot about them and their surroundings by what I hear.

Just for fun, snap your fingers. Now, how easily did you hear that sound?
Now extend your arm all the way out and do it again. How was that sound?
This was a simple exercise in listening.

Can you tell one bird from another if you hear chirping in the yard? Do hummingbirds sound like other birds? No, not at all.

I always drive with the passenger window cracked. It alerts me to outside sounds like the wind so I can tell how hard its blowing. If someone pulls a strange maneuver, I'll probably hear it before I see it.

Here's a question I'm sure John could secure the answer to from an associate. In Bruce Bolts book "Earthquakes" he said that when rocks are broken in the lab they emit an electrical discharge. So at what freqency is the sound that comes from that?

Now imagine that you are a big honken rock, way down under the ground and you're grinding away and a fracture occurs, but it isn't enough to push the fault to an earthquake, what kind of sound would you make? You already know that electricity is at work there, so it just magnified by a 1000 times or so from the laboratory test. Can someone hear that? Maybe not in the normal sense one thinks of hearing, but maybe they can hear the vibration it sends out that seems like a sound to the person who is hearing it?

This goes back to that silly game of words that has been played here like a broken record. What is sound? Sound is a vibration. So why does one think that this vibration that occurs in earthquake faults cannot be heard?

Indeed, something does happen in earthquake faults before they move. Its like throwing a tennis ball in the air before you hit it with the racket. There are steps to the earthquake occurrence.

Petra