DAVID H. BRANDIN
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REUBEN’s GRIFT
This is the story of Reuben Greenspan, the Earthquake Prophet, as he told it and wanted it believed, and how it was, according to the record he left and the memories of him and his relatives. In a way, it’s two stories that overlap in a mixture of truth and fantasy over time
Reuben’s family, a blend of Lithuanian and Belarusian Jews, migrated to Chicago from Eastern Europe in 1906. Born in 1904, he was too young to digest the San Francisco Earthquake. But that would change as he turned the newly literate world upside down with an extraordinary record of prophetic earthquake forecasts, followed by more successes and notorious failures. At any given moment, Reuben Greenspan was poet, Greenwich Village Notable, photographer, opportunist, distinguished scientist, mathematician, geophysicist, world traveler, merchant mariner, gambler, rake and bigamist, dreamer, smuggler, grifter, Bohemian, Earthquake Prophet, and Death Valley recluse. He was a complex man in complicated times….
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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).
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….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.
