I actually don't think that an earthquake prediction method that only gets part of time, location, and magnitude is uninteresting. But, if a prediction does not get all 3, then logically it is not much use for getting people out of the way of buildings. For magnitude, it would just need to be "larger than Mxxx". The problem is, on your (EQF) case, it is not clear to any of us who post on this that your method is interesting. Because you have the charts, and they are only for longitude and date, your predictions are very hard to evaluate. But, casually, it does not look like there is anything to it. And, since we don't know what you are measuring or how (EM), that is not interesting either. There are some places where publications have shown an effect of earth tides (Ocean spreading ridge between Pacific Plate and Juan De Fuca and other small plates, Maya Tolstoy and others). But, these are publications that can be evaluated, and since John Vidale presumably reads this literature and has done this sort of scientific work himself, since I don't have time or inclination to dive into this, then I pretty much am going to accept what Vidale has to say on this.

Many earthquake scientists absolutely do not think earthquakes are random events. It is widely accepted that they trigger each other if the initial quake is large enough (static stress, dynamic stress (I don't quite know what the latter means), and triggering of small quakes by the seismic waves directly. And, for many decades earthquake forecasting has been done (although not very well in some cases) by knowing the slip rates on faults and the size of previous earthquakes. This is usually done as a probability of an earthquake of a certain size (or ground motion for a location)over a period of decades. Such work can indeed save lives, because it is the basis of building codes and choices on what and where to retrofit.

I will admit that I was a bit stunned at how bone-headed seismologists involved with evaluating future earthquake magnitude offshore Honshu were. I ahd already found on line that theer had been an earthquake of similar tsunami size in the year 869 (?), then later learned that seismologists though that this subduction zone only failed in M7.5 to 8.0 quakes. That seemed negligent to me.

Chris