Stop if you heard this one: California is heading for a huge earthquake....in 30 years. While I do not doubt that the Golden State will someday slide into the Pacific, hopefully taking the Lindsay Lohans and Paris Hiltons of the world with it, but excuse me if I scoff at the prediction made by the scientific community as both alarmist and useless. Alarmist because as I already know, scientists publish these scary headlines because it helps with funding. Useless because the time frame is too big and vague to be useful.As a New Englander I was scared back in the 1980's when a catastrophic earthquake was predicted in my area within 20 years. And there was a precedent for this: the 1755 Cape Ann quake was one of the largest on record (and only weeks after the famous Lisbon quake) - if an earthquake of that magnitude hit my area today it would be devastating.But the 20 or so years have passed and not a murmur of this phantom quake on the ground or on the news. Sure we get tremors all the time - New England has plenty of old faults running through our granite- but what happened to THE BIG ONE? Maybe all the research money the seismologists got was actually used for research - and in so doing realized the threat was not so big as once thought. I got no problem with better research - but you could have told us!

Read the rest: http://www.angryjed.com/2008/04/stop-if-you-heard-this-one-california.html