A certain percentage of the notes which were posted to this bulletin board in the past were a little heated in their tone and content. I have not seen that happen in quite a while. And I am sure that Canie would be happy if things stayed that way. Part of that peace process has involved an informal arrangement where certain people would not post notes in response to other people’s notes. That is probably no longer necessary. But I am still trying to keep from doing that directly.

The goal of my earthquake forecasting effort is to save lives, not develop forecasting technology. However you really cannot do one without the other. Hence the occasional updates regarding my forecasting program.

The most important earthquakes to predict are probably the ones which occur about every two years and claim many thousands of lives. The last one was in January of 2001 in India. Prior to that there was one in August of 1999 in Turkey. When I believe that a destructive earthquake might be about to occur I have a list of government agencies, different types of groups, and individuals which I try to contact starting with the most important ones on the list. How many of the agencies etc. on the list are contacted depends on how destructive I think the earthquake may be and how much time I can devote to the effort. I had only about 5 hours to work with between when the important warning signals were detected and when that 2001 India earthquake occurred. And when something like that happens things can get pretty frantic. E-mail and FAX earthquake warnings and telephone calls are going everywhere at all hours of the day and night.

This EarthWaves bulletin board is somewhere on that list. And if I thought that a really destructive earthquake were about to occur or that a fairly powerful one were about to occur somewhere in the U.S. then if there were enough time I would probably try to post some type of note to the board and perhaps to a few Internet Newsgroups advising people to watch for an earthquake.

With all of these relatively harmless earthquakes it is really not worth the effort for me to try to post notes. The time is better invested in attempts to improve the performance of my forecasting program. For example, the best my program can do is point to the area where some past earthquake occurred. And if I do not have any earthquakes for some country in my database then my program cannot generate an accurate location for one in that area. At the moment I have a list of about 30 fairly to highly destructive earthquakes which I compare warning signals to first. After that I have a list of about 700 relatively or completely harmless earthquakes which I check.

There have been quite a few more than 30 fairly to highly destructive earthquakes over the years. And something that I still need to do is identify as many of them as I can, generate data for them regarding the positions of the sun and the moon in the sky etc. when they occurred, and then add those data to my earthquake database. I feel that in the future the lives of many people around the world and perhaps some here in the U.S. could and probably will depend on the completion of each of those types of steps. And they all take time.