Petra, yes, I'm looking forward to some rain in Seattle.

I noticed a similar theme, Cal's book and my criticisms of syzygy, and Jim's rebuttals of it, over on the Syzygy board today. I've avoided that board since Jim allowed trolls to make a series of nasty personal insinuations over the course of weeks, trolls he could have trivially identified at least with their IP addresses if he so desired, so I'll comment here instead.

But thanks to amg for an accurate history over there. To defend Roger, his numbers are the most direct test of the stated syzygy windows, I've mainly tried to test the stated principles behind syzygy.

Warning - this is more technical than the arguments Cal has already identified as incomprehensible and boring.

Jim claims again that any earthquake correlation with the diurnal (daily) tides necessarily means there is also a correlation with the biweekly tides, since the largest diurnal tides occur at the peaks in the biweekly tides.

However this is not true, either in the measurements we made or according to prevailing rate-and-state friction theory. Our measurements see a correlation with the diurnal tides but not the biweekly tides where the tides are the strongest, and theory predicts this, because the diurnal peaks and troughs cancel for multi-day intervals such as the biweekly tides.