REUBEN’s GRIFT

About the Book

REUBEN ….I’d driven to Santa Ana from South Laguna to tell John Blackburn, a reporter from the Santa Ana Register, about two future forecasts I’d recently completed. I’d had a particularly intense dream and tried a rebuilt simplified set of equations without the earth tides that still eluded me. But I’d gotten two results that were very persuasive. It was February 5, 1971. Blackburn, smiled. “Reuben, you’ve got quite an impressive history here, Eighty-seven percent accuracy in ’35, you said?” “I looked up the July 11, 1935 New York Times article,” he added. “The writer, Lawrence, was pretty complimentary.” I appreciated he did his homework, but I had mixed feelings about his comment. I feared he might have seen the August 1, 1935 Times Science Editor article, which was the opposite of complimentary…. “This is good work, Reuben,” John said, “But these predictions are history. What about the future earthquakes you mentioned on the phone? That’s what our readers want to know.” I smiled. I had a hot one for him in Southern California, Magnitude 6.6 at 6:03 AM, in just four days, and a less imminent forecast, for January 1973 in San Francisco. That was the one that excited me, even though some of the computational results needed double-checking. It could be an accurate prediction of the “Big One.” But boy, did I hit a home run on February 9, 1971—the Southern California Sylmar earthquake struck at 6:01 AM with Magnitude 6.7—it was only two minutes early …

About the Author

David Brandin is a retired mathematician and computer scientist. He served as Vice President and Director of SRI International Computer Sciences Division, and as President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Brandin is a fellow of the Economic Strategy Institute and the ACM. He co-authored The Technology War, J. Wiley, New York, 1987 and TBS Britannica (Japanese ed.), Tokyo, 1989, and a column on computing in California Business. His fiction includes four novels and three collections of short stories. He’s a certified Rescue Diver and resides on the Central Coast of California.