Chad Clark's Open Journal : 2008-04-14

1) John Wheeler died of pneumonia Sunday April 13th.

The AP article reads:

Physicist John A. Wheeler, who had a key role in the development of the
atom bomb and later gave the space phenomenon black holes their name, has
died at 96.

2) Can cloud formations indicate where an earthquake will occur?

The New Scientist article reads:

  Geophysicists Guangmeng Guo and Bin Wang of Nanyang Normal University in
  Henan, China, noticed a gap in the clouds in satellite images from
  December 2004 that precisely matched the location of the main fault in
  southern Iran. It stretched for hundreds of kilometres, was visible for
  several hours and remained in the same place, although the clouds around
  it were moving. At the same time, thermal images of the ground showed
  that the temperature was higher along the fault. Sixty-nine days later,
  on 22 February 2005, an earthquake of magnitude 6.4 hit the area, killing
  more than 600 people.
  
  ...
  
  In December 2005, a similar formation again appeared in the clouds for a
  few hours. Sixty-four days later, an earthquake of magnitude 6 shook the
  region
  
  ...
  
  "There is no physical model that explains why something would suddenly
  occur two months before an earthquake, and then shut off and not occur
  again," says Mike Blanpied of the US Geological Survey's Earthquake
  Hazards Program.