Hello, all!

I am Mike - known to some of you from the Syzygy boards run by Will for Jim Berkland.

I have been watching the postings of Roger and Lowell, and wanted to take this opportunity to jump in and thank Lowell for his time and efforts, and also to thank Roger for bringing my study and Jim's theory to Lowell's attention.

Roger and I have had our differences in the past, as a few of you might know. I am making an effort to forgive and forget whatever has been said in the past. Hopefully Roger will as well!

I am glad that all this has happened, as I do not like the flaming and strife that has occurred in the past - it is annoying and distracting, making it difficult to get any communications of substance across to the other parties.

I have also noted with some dismay the characterization of the Syzygy boards and JOB's website as crackpot, cultist, and other derogatory terms. I would hope that this would be stopped, as it is expressly against the rules of this forum. :)

"We have some simple guidelines to follow -
1: No derogatory posts allowed - they will be deleted.
2: You may disagree with someone who makes a post, but you may only do so in an adult manner that does not include degrading someone in any manner.
3: No foul language is allowed.
4: Please keep the post related to Earthquake Phenomena or Earth Changes related postings. You can have personal comments as a part of a related post, but no completely off-topic postings please. "

I'll be available via email or on this forum to answer any questions anyone has about my spreadsheets. I'm afraid I am not knowledgeable enough about JOB's theory to answer anything about that - those sorts of questions are best directed to Jim himself.

If you are interested, please download the full excel file from my website. The 6.5+ one is the better one to get - the other one only covers 7+ magnitude events in it's dataset.

As I said before, Roger and I have argued, flamed, and gotten quite out of hand with the personal insults and attack posts - on both sides. I have apologized before when I attacked him without cause (as I had made a heinous error in the spreadsheet, now corrected), and would like to apologize once more for all past transgressions.

I tend to get excited and go on the defensive at times when my intelligence or ethics are called into question, which unfortunately happened quite a lot. I'm willing to put aside the past and work from this point on as if making a new start.

About me : I am NOT a scientist. I am an NT engineer, 18yrs experience with various computers, operating systems, and software packages. Not a scientist.

I found JOB's website after reading a book (fiction) about earthquake prediction and doing some research on the subject. I found Jim to be friendly and always ready to answer questions on the subject, even those that some might consider silly or basic.

After determining that nobody had really undertaken a study of lunar events vs earthquake events, I did it myself. :)

In the spreadsheet are all of the earthquakes of magnitude 6.5 and up as registered by the NEIC between 1973 and 2000. I also entered all of the perigee, apogee, full moon, and new moon dates for the same period.

It was quite challenging, but I believe that I have corrected all of the errors in logic and methodology, due in part to help from Roger. Seems that even though we disagree on the subject of Probability vs Observed Probability, it really doesn't make much difference when it comes to relevance.

I took a lunar event, such as Perigee, and allowed the user to set a window size and offset for it. The size is the number of days of the window around the date, and the offset is when to start the window. For instance, a 7 day window with a -3.5 offset would be centered on the date in question.

I then counted all of the events in the dataset that occurred during this window. I didn't find any significant correlations when I used the simple windows around single lunar event dates.

Then I added the Syzygy windows - not JOB's windows, simply Syzygy windows as defined by the overlapping periods between either Apogee or Perigee and either New Moon or Full Moon. This gave me four more sets of event counts, and complicated the equations a bit.

The Syzygy periods for Perigee and New Moon had significance!

When you change the parameters to a 5 day window and -2.5 offset, the significance went up. I haven't yet experimented with all of the combinations of window size and offset, but there may be other, more significant combinations. These would be valuable to discover!

You can use any window size from .05 or perhaps even less up through 15 or 18. Over that point and the results are wildly inaccurate. I don't know why - perhaps the windows are overlapping with more than one other window?

The offset can range from -(window size) to +(window size) as all it does is slide the window along the date in question. For a 7 day window, a -7 would mean that the window ends with the date, a +7 would mean that the window begins 7 days after the event. I suppose you could use other values, but I'm not sure what use that would be.

To simulate JOB's windows, I would use a -1 offset, to get a -1/+6 window, in other words a window starting 1 day before the date and ending 6 days after it. This is not entirely accurate for all of JOB's windows, but is generally close. Lowell did a much more accurate study using actual windows provided by JOB.

I'm still working on the spreadsheet - I have yet to find a way to use Observed Probability as defined by Roger. I need to determine the number of Event Windows accurately, and haven't been able to get that number from the spreadsheet.

• My Syzygy Studies Website