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Comment by pg_bot | Hacker News Reader

Hmm this guy's focus on planetary movements and lunar geometry light up the parts of my brain reserved for detecting quackery.

I would bet that he got extremely lucky with his timing.

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Not debating whether this guy is a quack, but it's worth noting that there have been studies showing a strong correlation between accidents and the lunar cycle:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7954673/

There are also studies suggesting that lunar cycles causes behaviour changes in humans, which could explain that. This doesn't seem that unreasonable given that the lunar cycle has been shown to affect the behaviour of animals and insects:

https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/do-full-moons-an...

You're on to something here. I followed some information from the SSGeos website and found that they appear to use work done by a guy who is revered among astrologers, John H Nelson. I had never heard of the guy but it looks like he is a big cheese of early 20th century astrology believers who liked his studies on the effects on short-wave radio propagation under the influence of planetary alignments.

I think this is another case of a blind squirrel finding a nut. It's bound to happen once in a while.

Indeed. He'd have had more respect (and less suspicion) if he's tweet was something like: foreshake detected at xx,yy location, given the nature of the location, high probability of an earthquake of 7.5M.

He's fishing for attention from the general public.

Even if he said that, it'd be nonsense. Foreshocks usually do not precede larger earthquakes (https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-you-predict-earthquakes). Yes, sometimes they do, but it's uncommon. If every time you see foreshocks you predict a larger earthquake, sure, you'll very very occasionally be right. But you haven't done anything useful with your predictions.

(Note that I wouldn't be surprised if this is the kind of person who makes tons of predictions on Twitter, and then deletes the tweets when they turn out to be incorrect, leaving only the correct ones.)

Agreed, but it is specific enough to at least see if he can do it again, once = random, twice = coincidence but the chances of doing this twice are pretty remote.

What's exactly specific? I'm not an expert in Geology but my understanding is that these hot spots are largely known. The outlier prediction will be for a location of an earthquake outside these hot spots. Here is a random map I found on the internet but I think matches a few ones I've seen before: https://broadview.sacredsf.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Ma...

Heh, that map shows the west coast of the US as completely covered. I assure you that we don't have daily earthquakes that are even noticeable, let alone destructive. I live in an area covered by orange circles, and have for nearly 20 years, and I've never felt a M7+ earthquake. The ones I usually do feel are no more than M4.5 or so, and happen at most a few times a year.

My point is that it doesn't really matter if you "predict" an earthquake inside or outside these hot spots: you will nearly always be wrong. And when you are right, it will be due to luck.

For a much better idea of frequency, intensity, depth, and hot zones ..

Animated map: All earthquakes, 15 years, Jan 1, 2001 - Dec 31, 2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed0tGlfJHiY

Years ago I made an observation that an earthquake would happen based on a near earth object. It ended up being the one in Chile. I do wonder if there's some kind of correlation considering that green comet is flying by

That's not how physics works.

The sun completely dominates all other bodies in the solar system when it comes to gravitational effects on Earth (even the moon has less of an effect than the sun, despite its proximity). The Earth doesn't even notice this comet's existence, gravitationally speaking.

The Gradient between the gravitational forces on different parts of the earth is larger for the moon though, as you can see by the tides. I would assume this would have a bigger effect than the total force. But you are right, a comet or asteroid isn’t going to do anything.

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