Hi Don,

Now you can see why Tom Jordan's program is much more appealing. You set your own parameters and tell them what you consider a hit, not by the traditional way of having to have all 3 components perfect. It provides some latitude in how one judges success. Being .1 off is like it was 5.0 off and so forth, a day late is more than a dollar short and Chalome is only 3 miles from Parkfield, but if you said Parkfield and it was Chalome, it's still a miss.

Its all in a word. One little thing and its all garbage. Do you wonder now why any scientist would want to do this, or say he/she could? Its not very favorable, but interesting and it makes us work all the harder to see if we can do what others say is impossible.

I'm horribly competitive and I'd love to live by this slogan "no one dies on my watch", but that may not ever be possible either.

As they say, practice makes perfect, maybe in a few years we'll see if that's true regarding predicting earthquakes. Hopefully a scientist or two reads here every now and then, and they can live the experience vicariously through us.

Petra