Joined: 9/21/2009
Posts: 1047
Location: California
Warp wrote:
Did you know that earthquakes often happen in close succession?
Yes.
Warp wrote:
Having 3 major earthquakes around Japan within one day is not surprising at all. On the contrary, it's expected: If there's one big earthquake, it's expected for there to be many others soon after. The continental plates seldom settle up in one go.
That is true. However, the aftershocks tend to be noticeably smaller and it is unusual for 3 6.0+ quakes to all happen in the same day. Not only that, but the order went: 6.2, 6.5, 6.3 (note, those 3 Japan earthquakes may or may not have been affected by alignments).
Fast forward a couple days to the alignment from the prediction and look at the 7.0+'s around Vanuatu. 3 in just AN HOUR IN A HALF. 7.0, 7.1, 7.4 in that order.
Warp wrote:
There are thousands of significant earthquakes around the world every year. Hence predicting an earthquake on a specific day has a pretty high chance of being correct. Make enough predictions and some of them are bound to "predict" big earthquakes. Especially effective if you afterwards choose from the many predictions only those which happened to "predict" earthquakes which get in the news.
Making a random prediction and making a prediction based on evidence is not the same thing. Obviously if you get 365 people and assign them all a specific date for a big quake to happen, one of them is bound to be correct. That isn't what happened here.
Warp wrote:
Since earthquakes happen almost every day, it's expected for them to happen also in days where there are planetary alignments. Correlation does not imply causation (in other words, just because planetary alignments happen at the same time as earthquakes doesn't necessarily mean one causes the other).
Earthquakes do happen every day. Not almost every day. Significant earthquakes (6.0+) do not happen every day. However, they SEEM to happen MORE OFTEN when there are alignments of planetary bodies.
Warp wrote:
Think about it in the opposite direction: If planetary alignments cause earthquakes, then what causes earthquakes when there are no alignments? Couldn't a more reasonable explanation be that it's the same reason that causes all earthquakes, rather than some of them being caused by planetary alignments and the rest by something else?
I'm not saying planetary alignments cause earthquakes. I'm saying there is A LOT of evidence that alignments may cause increased seismic activity.
During a hot summer where I live, the Sun can ignite wild fires by itself. Is that the only way for a wild fire to start? I think not.
Warp wrote:
sonicpacker wrote:
to predict it 9 months in advance
I'm curious to know why you think the timeframe is of any significance. What does it matter if the earthquake was "predicted" the previous week or 20 years ago? What difference does that make? It's not like earthquakes become more and more certain (and hence easier to predict) the closer they are to happening. This is not weather forecasting.
Maybe to you it's not like weather forecasting since you obviously don't even acknowledge legitimate evidence as being possibly true. It's clearly more impressive to say a specific thing will happen long before it actually ends up happening.
Fast forward a couple days to the alignment from the prediction and look at the 7.0+'s around Vanuatu. 3 in just AN HOUR IN A HALF. 7.0, 7.1, 7.4 in that order.
I really can't understand what you are getting at. Earthquakes happen, there are often foreshocks and aftershocks. There's nothing unusual about this, even though you make it sound like this is highly unusual.
I'm pretty certain that many such strings of earthquakes have happened when there is no planetary alignment of any kind. Some is bound to happen when there is some kind of alignment. Predict such an earthquake on each alignment, and you will be right eventually, especially if we give it an error margin of +-1 day, giving us a three-day window (as seems to be the case here).
Making a random prediction and making a prediction based on evidence is not the same thing.
Making a prediction based on random "evidence" is the same thing as making a random prediction. You could take any recurring phenomenon you like and use it to "predict" earthquakes and you will most probably have the same rate of success. Planetary alignment is not any more special than anything else.
Obviously if you get 365 people and assign them all a specific date for a big quake to happen, one of them is bound to be correct. That isn't what happened here.
It's the other way around: Have earthquakes every day of the year, and "predict" that earthquakes will happen on a specific day, and there's a pretty good chance that it will be correct. However, it's not any more impressive than predicting that the sun will raise on the 15th of May. Or predicting that the 12th of June will be a really hot day.
I'm not saying planetary alignments cause earthquakes. I'm saying there is A LOT of evidence that alignments may cause increased seismic activity.
"A lot" of evidence? Can you give references to peer-reviewed publications? If there is indeed "a lot" of such evidence, surely you can give us a dozen such publications. (And please don't insult my intelligence by resorting to conspiracy theories.)
Warp wrote:
sonicpacker wrote:
to predict it 9 months in advance
I'm curious to know why you think the timeframe is of any significance. What does it matter if the earthquake was "predicted" the previous week or 20 years ago? What difference does that make? It's not like earthquakes become more and more certain (and hence easier to predict) the closer they are to happening. This is not weather forecasting.
Maybe to you it's not like weather forecasting since you obviously don't even acknowledge legitimate evidence as being possibly true. It's clearly more impressive to say a specific thing will happen long before it actually ends up happening.
You are avoiding the question. Exactly why is it impressive?
The comparison to weather forecasting is pretty relevant: If they crunch all the numbers in a supercomputer array and come up with the conclusion that tomorrow will be sunny, and even give a specific average local temperature, that's nothing impressive. This is because weather can be predicted from current data and measurements to a relatively high degree of accuracy.
However, if someone gave an accurate prediction of the weather for every single day for the next full year, and he would be completely right, that would be quite impressive. (Even predicting one week forward is too difficult by number crunching because weather patterns are too random for that. Predicting an entire year, and doing it accurately, would be an impressive feat indeed.)
Earthquakes are a completely different story, though. We do not currently have any way to measure and predict the occurrence of earthquakes, and thus they are still very unpredictable. A magnitude 9 earthquake could happen within one hour somewhere for all we know. The amount of time between the "prediction" and when the earthquake happens is not really relevant. Whether such a prediction was made last week or 20 years ago doesn't make much difference. It's not any more or less impressive.
I would be more impressed if someone used planetary alignments to not only predict earthquakes with an error margin of a couple of days, but to an accuracy of an hour, the place where it will happen, and its magnitude, and did so consistently.
Also, I could perhaps buy that an alignment of the Moon, the Earth and the Sun would make earthquakes more likely, and this was backed up with peer-reviewed data. That's because the Moon and the Sun have a significant gravitational effect on the Earth due to tidal forces, and it might be plausible that they affect how continental plates behave. OTOH, has such an effect ever been demonstrated?
Joined: 2/28/2006
Posts: 2275
Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
stop feeding the troll...
anyway, first relevant idea in the thread:
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
"Mommy, where do earthquakes come from?"
"Well, when a mama plate and a papa plate love each other very much..."
......
"When the fault is a rockin', don't bother knockin'!"
This sounds like some interesting Rule 34 material. :D
