This forecasting program effort is evolving with sufficient speed that it is once again becoming difficult to post timely notes here regarding the latest developments.

--- A combination of Perl and Gnuplot are being used to generate the maps and charts with the Etdprog.exe earthquake forecasting computer program.

--- A chart line resolution problem has been solved by having the Perl program switch from sending Gnuplot integer numbers to sending it decimal type numbers.

--- A move is being made from the use of gif and jpg files to png type picture files. The images appear to be quite a bit clearer. There are no “shadows” around the chart lines and text.

--- In response to my Newsgroup inquiries several people suggested having Windows use shared memory for file sharing between Perl and Gnuplot. For certain reasons I would like to find an alternative to having the files stored on the computer hard drive. Perl to Gnuplot “pipes” work fine for sending commands to Gnuplot. But they appear to be too slow and prone to error for transferring large blocks of data. The code used to get Windows to create a shared memory area appears to be a little complicated. But it should be possible to learn how to get it to work.

EARTHQUAKE TRIGGERING

People have been reporting that researchers at UC Berkeley have discovered that the sun and moon gravities are having an effect on earthquake triggering. Holy Cow!!! Isn’t that an amazing discovery!

And the truly amazing part is that the discovery was made perhaps only 15 years after I first began discussing this in Newsgroup notices, at my Web sites, in internationally circulated E-mail notes, in Internet Bulletin Boards postings, in at least one internationally circulated news report, in a television documentary shown around the world, at a scientific conference in the People’s Republic of China (by one of my research colleagues), and after I published a formally copyrighted research paper that began discussing this and perhaps 5 years to a decade after I formally copyrighted a second research paper on the subject and copyrighted my computer program software related to this.

Isn't it just astonishing how quickly geology specialists around the world are able to learn (humor intended)?

Not having actually read the publication I still expect that my earthquake triggering work is probably at least 5 to 10 years more advanced than what was reported in the publication. And my earthquake forecasting work that relies on the earthquake triggering research is still 10 to 20 years more advanced.

PERSPECITIVE

When natural disasters are involved and human lives are at stake, researchers cannot afford to wait until they have absolute proof that some solution for the problem works. Unless it is obvious that it is so unreasonable that it could not possibly work, the researchers need to try to use the procedure to see if it might be generating any helpful data. And if so they then need to try to improve its performance. Waiting until absolute proof is available invariably results in lives being lost that might have been saved.

It appears that a good percentage of earthquake researchers around the world have still not made that particular discovery!

These are personal opinions.