Since I am not acquainted with the facts in the Charlotte King case, I will not comment
on that. The word "noise" was used in my response to Don in a scientific sense, not
in a cultural sense. That is "noise" in that posting means information that cannot
be deciphered because of it's complexity and which makes other useful information
difficult to discern. "Sounds" are quite different from noise because sounds have
specific information which can be discerned (like tone, pitch etc.). It seems to me that what
you and Charlotte are hearing are "sounds" not "noises". and this makes a great
deal of difference.

Research showing a correlation between sounds heard or other information
which is discerned before earthquakes is important in many ways. It is especially
important, however, in providing clues as to the processes that occur prior to
earthquake occurrence, information that may some day be used to help solve
the earthquake (and earthquake prediction) puzzle.

There are many reasons why public predictions and forecasts are usually bad
policy whether the source is credible or not especially in the field of earthquakes.
Like I said above, I do not know what kind of predictions Ms. King makes, but
I have seen many vague predictions which are perfectly correct, and perfectly
useless to anyone. A prediction of an earthquake in California of Mb>5 in the
next month may turn out to be true, but how can anyone act on that information
even if they knew that it was completely true beforehand. California is a big
place and societal problems associated with forecasting and predictions always
have to be weighed against the usefulness of making a public prediction.

Hazard mitigators are also restricted in what they may say by public policy
and law. It is easy for us to argue that Mr/Mrs. X should have made a prediction
public. It is much harder for MR/S X to deal with the consequences of
such a predictions on the public and on the ability of hazard mitigators to
do their job and to protect the most people from harm and financial loss.