Blog #1 Natural Disasters

I read an article about an earthquake in Asia. The whole topic of the article is whether or not earthquakes can be predicted and if people can be forewarned. A lot of people are spreading rumors saying that the government was warned about the earthquake but just ignored it. Four people ended up getting arrested for spreading rumors on the internet. Zhang Xiadong claims that there is no way to predict earthquakes. The rest of the article explains how a lot of Chinese people are very superstitious. One sign of the earthquake was a gathering of a bunch of toads in the streets. I think that there probably are signs of an earthquake, but probably subtle things that would be easy to miss. I think that as the years go on technology and information will improve and eventually there will probably be a way to predict earthquakes.




http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/world/asia/16rumors.html?fta=y