Don --

I understand what you are saying. Maybe I look at things differently -- for one reason, I live in Las Vegas. The longer a progressive jackpot slot machine goes without hitting, the closer it gets to hitting. As each day goes by, it will happen, sooner rather than later. The machine may be programmed with a random number generator, but it's a fact that the jackpot will eventually pay off. And as the jackpot goes higher, the payoff is always going to be closer.

Earthquakes occur with similar randomness. Each day we are one day closer to that fault slipping somewhere and the "big one" hitting. No one knows when it's going to happen anymore than they know when and where the next mega-jackpot will hit.

Heck, it might be easier to predict where and when the next Wheel of Fortune quarters machine will hit, than predict where and when the next earthquake will
hit. And forget predicting the size of the jackpot or the magnitude of the quake! Just get the where and when correct and you'd be doing great. And, once again, I'm talking about an earthquake over a magnitude 5 -- forget those puny ones. Slot machines with small jackpots are in just about every town in Nevada. Earthquakes with small magnitudes are on just about every fault in California.

Another similarity that slot machines and earthquakes share is their tendency to go through cycles. Sometimes a machine will go through a cycle of really paying off for quite a while, and then it seems to go dry for awhile. Earthquakes go through similar periods of seismicity and then quiescence.

God built randomness into nature for a reason. Funny thing: man can reproduce randomness, but he doesn't know the real reason behind it. Just like a monkey, we can imitate, but we really don't know what we are doing. I think there is a deeper meaning here that we are totally missing.

And maybe, just maybe, we were never meant to understand in this lifetime -- maybe that's the way God intended it. Maybe God is saving some surprises for us.

Enough philosophizing... Wish I really knew where that next mega-jackpot machine was going to hit -- and no eartones, no animals, no syzygy, no tides to help me out on this one.

Barbara