(1) Shan's sun and moon shadow based earthquake forecasting method has been the subject of some intensive research efforts lately.

A data table has been created which contains summarized information regarding forecasts which he made during a several month period of time. And a preliminary report has been written discussing his method and the information in the data table.

I understand that the table and report are both due to be made available to the public in the near future. Watch for announcements.

The creation of that data table is in my opinion vital to the success of Shan's method. Without one it would be difficult to effectively evaluate his method. Now some statistical tests can be done on it etc.

(2) I have been talking with people everywhere regarding the creation of computer program subroutines which could be fed a UTC day and time. And they would then generate subsolar and sublunar point data and perhaps similar data for the planets for that time.

Subsolar etc. means the following: You draw a line between the center of the Earth and the center of the sun. The location where that line crosses the surface of the Earth is the subsolar point. The same applies to the moon and to the planets.

Everyone seems to agree that we need to have computer programs which can do that. No one seems to have any ideas for how to get them developed. I myself don't have time.

Instead what I myself recently did is develop a procedure for using the U.S. Navy's MICA program as a type of computer program subroutine. And it will now automatically generate those types of data. Developing that procedure required all of the computer programming tricks that I knew and some that I had to invent.

Essentially, a Basic language program accepts UTC time information manually. Or it can be told to read a file containing information for recent earthquakes etc. and extract the UTC time data and store it in another file. It then directs the MICA program to read that file, generate the subsolar and sublunar data, and then store them in a file. The Basic program then reads that output file and extracts the appropriate subsolar and sublunar data etc. from it.

With my old computer I was doing that with a different celestial events data program. But the program control and data extraction routines I was using will not run on my newer computer. So I had to do some inventing. The good news is that this can all be done with Basic which is an easy program to then use for calculations. And it takes only a fraction of a second to generate the necessary data for a given time. That used to take almost 30 seconds per earthquake with my older computer. The bad news is that the MICA program will generate data for only the years 1990 to 2005. And many important earthquakes occurred before 1990. To get this to work you also have to purchase the MICA program (about 25$).

In any case, some progress in this area is better than no progress.

(3) Something that I have been proposing is that different parts of the earthquake research that I am doing are probably 10 to 25 years ahead of what other researchers are doing.

My forecasts etc. rely heavily on what I have been calling the "Gravity Point." This is the location on the Earth's surface where the combined gravitational pulls of the sun and the moon are strongest at a given point in time. To calculate it you have to know what the strengths of the gravitational pulls of the sun and the moon are on the Earth at a given time. And when you take into account the different shape orbits of the Earth around the sun and the moon around the Earth, and the fact that although solar gravity is largely a constant across the Earth the moon gravity varies strongly from the near side of the Earth to its far side, the gravity strength calculations etc. start to get a little complicated.

I have found that for some reason a flat value of 2.5 for moon gravity strength versus sun gravity strength seems to produce the best results. And lately I have been working on seeing how values other than 2.5 work. The results are rather dramatic and a little unnerving.

This is a science where many of the rules are presently being made based on what works best rather than purely on logic combined with celestial and geophysical data. And what is very disturbing about that is the fact that with earthquake related research efforts so many lives can hang in the balance.

There are some other important research projects underway that I know about. I do not have permission to discuss them at the moment.

These are personal opinions.