User talk:Ngrant5

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Re: Haiti earthquake

A blog on a video game site is not a reliable source, and we generally avoid citing fringe theories unless they;re very well supported - see Wikipedia:Fringe theories. To be honest, it's extremely unlikely that this guy's predictions are any better than guesswork. Even with major research efforts by seismologists, nobody's been able to succeed at earthquake prediction - there are some methods of prediction that show a correlation, but nothing's an accurate predictor of earthquakes like this man says he is.

This particular set of predictions has a few cases where it's at loast close to what really happened. Things like this are subject to huge amounts of confirmation bias and selective reporting - this site mentions a few unusually close predictions, but who's to say that there weren't hundreds, even thousands, of totally false ones? You need a very large number of correct predictions to be successful at predicting earthquakes. This man has what, three "close" of which one was magnitude 3.9?

Planetary alignments, like the ones this man claims predict earthquakes, are basically irrelevant. Every year, the earth and sun align with the center of the Milky Way galaxy (much more massive than Jupiter), and nothing happens. Just with some simple math, we find that the gravitational force of the sun and Jupiter on earth is much less than the force of the moon on earth - the tides follow the moon's orbit with a slight influence from the sun, but Jupiter has essentially no effect on the tides, and the sun's influence is much less than that of the moon. Nobody has reported any correlation between a "supermoon" and major earthquakes, and the gravitational forces of the sun and Jupiter combined are less than that of the "supermoon". Even if the alignment produced super-gravity that was enough to have any effect on fault lines, who's to say that the gravity wouldn't hold the fault shut instead of loosening it?

The supermoon is irrelevant to major earthquakes, so why should a much smaller effect from Jupiter and the sun have any effect?

So basically, you need much stronger evidence than a video game blog if you're going to assert that some planetary alignment caused the Haiti and Tōhoku earthquakes. Bart133 ^{t c @} 17:32, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Oh, and it's not vandalism - you're not intentionally trying to damage the encyclopedia. Just adding unreliably sourced information. There's nothing wrong with that in this case, even though it'll be deleted. Bart133 ^{t c @} 17:34, 29 March 2011 (UTC)