Gawd, Petra-what an ego!! You should tone it down a bit. I'm embarrassed for you. In your posts, the ratio of the first person singular pronoun to all other words is higher than for any other poster in this forum, by far.

My suspicion is that you've gotten most of your knowledge of seismology from the Internet (and attending a few meetings of AGU to see and be seen). You should try reading actual books and journals. And not just the lay press. I read the actual, original source, product that the seismologists you so disdain labor so hard to create. These people are anything but closed-minded, and they are extraordinarily intelligent. And they can do the math. And their education in the subject at hand is vastly greater than yours or mine. You are the one who is coming off as closed-minded. John V.'s neural network understands the 103-140 degree "shadow zone" a couple of orders of magnitude better than yours does - and he also has access to and comprehends the previous studies and statistics that fail to support the phenomena that you so ardently, and incomprehensibly, believe in. And Kerry Sieh, who I've met, and whose work I've read, would be just as skeptical about your theories as John V. is, despite your name-dropping.

Mike Williams in Arroyo Grande, CA