Friday my wife mentioned that Thailand would have an 8 Richter earthquake this weekend; she wondered if our daughter should stay home from school.
I Googled and found only the above link which shows
But just a few hours ago we read
What?!?! 
:smack: 
Even if you’re willing to accept that “a tsunami that does not affect Thailand” is somehow equivalent to “an 8 point earthquake in Thailand,” the effect of Jupiter’s gravity is famously equivalent to that of a soccer ball held at arms length. And Uranus’s makes that look significant. The moon’s gravitational effect on us absolutely dwarfs any contribution from any other planet: Jupiter’s contribution would be lost in the measurement noise. It’s not going to shift sand grains, much less cause faults to slip.
And the conjunction was more than a week ago, anyway (early morning June 6). And sunspot activity has been normal.
There are earthquakes every day, all over the world. “Predicting” one (and getting both the magnitude and the location wrong) using a non-existent gravitational effect of a non-existent alignment of outer planets (which also, incidentally, have no effect on sunspots) isn’t much of a prediction.
Spoilsport.
What I meant to say was, “yes, this is a brilliant confirmation of centuries of pivotal research into the astrological sciences.” It just came out wrong.
Please note that I don’t believe in astrology, and thought (and still think) the prediction was absurd.
But … the prediction reported by my wife and at the link I posted were both for Saturday the 12th, off by only 1 hour since the big earthquake was at 1 am Sunday; the location (Nicobar Islands) is very close to the predicted Phuket venue; the intensity (7.5 or 7.7) makes this earthquake a rare event, and close to the 8-Richter prediction.
Let me repeat. I don’t believe in astrology. I do believe that coincidences are often chance accidents. However, do give credit to the chance coincidence for what it is. 7.5 Richter events do not “happen every day”, the prediction was for 12 June; the epicenter was only a few hundred kms from the Phuket prediction.
(Use of half-truths to debunk calls for its own debunking! 
)
The article mentioning the conjunction wasn’t written by the “astrologer.”
If the earthquake was predicted for this weekend specifically, and occurred this weekend, that the conjunction was a week earlier is actually a point in the astrologer’s favor! Clear?
Not that I think he has enough points in favor to make his prediction method valid… 
OR: the reporter is psychic but isn’t aware of it yet. 
It means nothing unless you have a list of all predictions made in this manner. Even a blind dog finds a squirrel once in a while.
And it doesn’t really sound accurate to me either, since what was predicted didn’t really happen.
There’s a goatse joke in here somewhere…
Don’t worry - the U.S. has a trump card in the field of earthquake anticipation.
No, they don’t, but they’re hardly rare events, either. There have been more than 25 6+ earthquakes thus far this year, and eight 7+ (more than one a month). If we’re going to accept +/1 a day as a “correct guess”, you’ve got a 10% chance of getting it right if you pick any day at all. I’m not denying it’s an interesting coincidence, but it’s about as much of a coincidence as discovering the person on the bus next to you has a birthday in the same month as you do – unexpected, but not outrageously so.
I won’t even entertain for a moment the notion that there could ever possibly be anything to astrology, Thai or otherwise.
“Even a clock that doesn’t run is right twice a day.”
I wish my mom would have let me stay home from school and have a three-day weekend because an earthquake might happen.
My daughter does extracurricular activities, the day in question was Saturday, so the choice was between 2-day and 1-day weekend.
My wife was a very young schoolgirl when Sky Lab fell down, and the teachers had all the kids worrying it would fall on their heads. :smack: That was a weekday, so my wife did get a day off from school then!