Petra (and others)-I let this slide yesterday but today I want to comment. I took some of your comments above as unreasonable. I'd actually be interested in your (briefly) clarifying. And, maybe you will be interested in how the system works to my understanding. What did you do-go up to a bunch of practicing research scientists and professors and ask for money? Since I am chronically (sp?) underfunded, I have donated a couple 100 k $ of my time to research on active faults. I'm not going to donate to preparedness, because it is not my particular interest-I'd rather donate to poor and hungry people. It would be unethical and possibly illegal for a NSF program director to hand you tax money without you going through the proposal, review, and panel process. I would be upset if I knew this was being done-it was done in one case by another goverment agency, and I was upset. Also, there is a lot of public education done-that would be done under different parts of the funding groups-there is a lot of science education done by NSF. NSF and USGS fund SCEC (Southern California Earthquake Center), and they have a big public outreach component. But, if you just ask for some money from them to do preparedness, they will not give it to you. But, you might contact whoever is in charge of outreach at SCEC and discuss what sorts of projects they fund and what is involved.

Moving on, I'd be interested in more comments from Canie on what she would like to see posted here. It is true this page is less interesting since Lowell (almost) stopped posting, and Roger seems to post less. I enjoy Don's earthquake/fault facts and history. It seems there was no followup from trying to look at some of the claims on this page scientifically-Roger's graphs on FFAs and New Guinea-California relations. Don's predictions were interesting, but Lowell sometimes seemed to be overreaching on definitions of success, and I may be wrong, but Lowell seems to be involved with the people supplying the "data" to Don, so the evaluation may not be completely independent. That is why I would be curious to see Roger evaluate these predictions (of last spring, was it?).

So, my interests are science based-that is what I find interesting, and I am a little bothered when things are accepted as fact on this page without evaluation. But, it was originally a page for earthquake sensitives and I suppose I could clam up or go away-I should be doing research and writing papers and proposals anyway...I originally started to come to this page over a year ago at Lowell's suggestion, and I am interested in some of the "Far out" stuff, and Lowell gets a lot of slack in my book by writing his comps paper on distant P and S wave triggering of earthquakes 2 years before Landers....But, I've given some of his ideas flack on this page because my casual, non-scientific observations, along with some of Roger's plots, of earthquake occurrence do not make solar triggering, or FFAs,seem like dominating factors.....although they are interesting and probably important even if they are weak factors-because this addresses how earthquakes are triggered.

Chris