Roger,

If your program can add the names for countries based on the latitude and longitude of an earthquake then that would be quite helpful.

I would rather not use a spreadsheet program for these applications. Instead, the TrueBasic (or whatever) program should read the earthquakes from a text file and then do whatever is necessary to process them such as reversing the sort order.

The way the program would remove aftershocks is to just state that within a certain time window, earthquakes having specific longitude and latitude ranges that have magnitudes below a certain value will be eliminated from the earthquake list. That would then get rid of many of the ones that are being triggered at random. After that time window ends the list could once again include those earthquakes.

After that powerful earthquake in Baja California (Mexico) a while back there were so many randomly triggered aftershocks in the data files that my forecasting program stopped working. I had to go through my database file and eliminate them using a spreadsheet program. Then I created a Perl program that filtered them out of later earthquake lists. I had to use both the spreadsheet program and the Perl program again to filter out a tremendous number of aftershock earthquakes following that 9 magnitude March 11, 2011 earthquake in the Japan area.

Regarding that destructive earthquake list I mentioned,

This would just be a text file containing standard types of information regarding destructive earthquakes plus some additional entries such as the number of fatalities etc. The USGS lists and other lists simply don’t contain that much detail. And in my opinion, researchers around the world need those types of data. As some of those data involve the positions of the sun and the moon in the sky, your sun and moon location programs would be the logical ones to use.

Each earthquake in that data file would be on a single line with the different entries such as latitude and longitude separated by a semicolon probably. Normally commas are used. But, the country names often contain commas. And that would confuse any programs trying to read the text file. So, something never found in a country name such as a semicolon would be better. Using tabs for separators is not a good idea as they can confuse programs that might want to read the text file. Semicolons are easy to identify. Other symbols such as an @ sign or % sign might also work as they are not usually found in earthquake data or country names.

I am expecting to be extremely busy until the end of May and probably won’t have much time to work on this particular effort.