The music of the spheres. …
Largest quake of this spell:
5.7 2011/12/19 at 01:23. 1.3 South. 119.6 East. SULAWESI, INDONESIA
Sun -23° 23.8'
Mercury -18° 43.5'
Venus -22° 21.2'
Moon -8° 23.6'[/URL]
Mars +7° 47.2'
Jupiter +10° 24.8'
Saturn -8° 19.0'
Uranus -0° 24.2'
Neptune -12° 29.0'
Pluto -19° 19.9'
Minus means south of the equator or west of the Greenwich meridian. The co-ordinates are given in degrees, minutes and seconds of arc.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Maps/10/285_-45.php
http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Solar
Now, with absolutely no other reason to suppose that it is so than that it would make life easier, let us suppose that Kepler's Laws coupled with Bodes Law ensures the planets are equally spaced no matter where they are in orbit except perhaps in occlusion behind the sun or as near to opposition as makes no difference.
With the earth in the centre of the Solar System they all bear equal weight onit, right?
Suspend disbelief.
Call 0° neutral. Uranus is neutral.
The sun Venus and Mercury are all at or near BdC {Wilipedia: "More generally, the dead centre is any position of a crank where the applied force is straight along its axis, meaning no turning force can be applied."}
So they too are in neutral. More or less.
All the others are more or less on or in that neutral point which has the most effect on the earth as regards weather over Britain.
How much circumstantial evidence goes along with that?
Hurricanes keep out of the equator. Hadley cells divide over the ITCZ = The Equator too, nearly.
60 degrees from where I live (7 or 8 degrees south) is a sort of Lagrangian point for the weather here.
In most coastal places two high tides occur because there are two Lagrangian Points in the diurnal effect on tides.
Actually there are 4 for each celestial body, stars included:
Rise, transit, set and occlusion. So maybe that's only three (so shoot me.) OTOH there may only be two:
Above the horizon and below it.
That sounds more likely. It would fit the behaviour of tides best too. Well it would in Fiji. Everywhere else the term best isn't exactly a good description of suiting.
Neutral is when we get our best weather. Hurricanes for instance require absolute calm. Tornadoes and thunder storms do too. And we had the recent snow due to a Col which is a neutral period in meteorology.
***
It's reaching for a tall stretch but the idea doesn't fall over. Does it?
And BdC and TdC are dead spots in a motor vehicle (also longest "points of dwell".)
weathercharts 
Year,Month,Day,Time(hhmmss.mm)UTC,Latitude,Longitude,Magnitude,Depth, 2010,02,27,063411.53,-36.122, -72.898,8.8, 22,PDE 2010,04,06,221501.58, 2.383, 97.048,7.8, 31,PDE-W 2010,06,12,192650.46, 7.881, 91.936,7.5, 35,PDE-W 2010,07,23,225112.45, 6.486, 123.467,7.6,585,PDE-W 2010,10,25,144222.46, -3.487, 100.082,7.8, 20,PDE-W 2011,03,11,054624.12, 38.297, 142.373,9.0, 29,PDE-W 2011,03,11,061540.28, 36.281, 141.111,7.9, 42,PDE-W 2011,03,11,062550.30, 38.058, 144.590,7.7, 18,PDE-W 2011,07,06,190318.26,-29.539,-176.340,7.6, 17,PDE-WThese are the quakes of over 7.4 Mag. from 2010 on. That is, the BIG ones.Day Month Year Magnitude Latitude Longitude27 2 2010 8.8 S.36.1 W.72.96 4 2010 7.8 N.2.4 E.97.012 6 2010 7.5 N.7.9 E.91.923 7 2010 7.6 N.6.5 E.123.425 10 2010 7.8 S.3.5 E.100.111 3 2011 9 N.38.3 E.142.411 3 2011 7.9 N.36.3 E.141.111 3 2011 7.7 N.38.0 E.144.66 7 2011 7.6 S.29.5 W.176.3Now all I have to do at no cost to anyone interested enough to waste time here, is chase up the planetary co-ordinates that go along with them.But first some more boring stuff:
When I took my first motorcycle engine apart I was confronted for the first time with engineering that didn't make sense.It was a Rubic's Cube of a mystery what all the parts were for and what order they go back in.What I had discovered were shims. I thought they had some sort of purpose like balancing the crank or aiding lubrication, even acting as seals, I just couldn't see how.***When Britain entered the Second World War as it became known, they had only recently settled on an engine for their aircraft. Up till then they used air cooled rotary machines that fitted around the propeller and got in the way of the slipstream. Or hopelessly problematic in line ones.They settled for Rolls Royce's in-line, 4 valved, vee twinned, four stroke. with high compression -something that required the dangerously high explosive and poisonous lead tetra ethyl to add to the petrol to make 5 star quality fuel.A very cutting edge machine in its day.Then they had to get factories set up to make them. And in an hurry. So they just threw the things together using all the parts that came hot off the presses.The problem was that the engine was poorly designed. They had to use shims ("washers" of varying thickness according to how badly the parts fitted) to take up the slack.The attrition on such machines is great but they were not expected to see a lifetime's service. In fact it was relatively recently that a motor car made in Britain could expect to last 100,000 miles.Nobody wanted them to, least of all the salesmen. And making an engine sloppy then filling the gaps with shims was quite acceptable. Even in a war plane where a good pilot was irreplaceable.As the need for the engines increased they asked Ford to make them too. Ford refused.There's a war on and Ford refused.The engine design was too poor for their standards, so Rolls redrew the specifications and produced a decent engine that has since become something of a legend.Thankfully, by the time I got my motorcycle the lesson hadn't been learned and today there is no motorcycle industry in this country. And I learned why. I learned about shims.***God uses shims. I don't know if there is another planet in the galaxy waiting for us that doesn't have these shims. I can't imagine an engine utilising spherical cams working very well without them.But anyway. Out between Mars and Jupiter that are no end of these shimmy shammy things, each one absolutely essential to keeping the universe balanced.The whole Universe -not just our bit.***On the other side of the large planets there are more of them. Pluto is regarded as one, these days. My whole life long it had been a planet, then I woke up one morning and they had rewritten all the text books.I was OK with that. I had always suspected Pluto of being a fraud as it came inside Neptune's orbit occasionally. I regarded it as one of Neptune's moons. And who knows, perhaps one day they will find another Neptune sharing its orbit, fulfilling Bode/Titius' Law of logarithmic spacing.
The Cavendish experiment made use of the new invention called the microscope. It was good enough in Cavendish's time to measure the attraction of gravity on 3 large heavy spheres suspended on stretched wire.He found that when the weights were symmetrical about the central one, there was no attraction. Putting both weights on one side of the <ahem>central</ahem> one showed a measurable deviation.From this he was able to work out the weight of the earth and moon etc.Nobody but me seems to have realised its effect on the lunar theory of tides. I can't think why that is.I have never found the idea of water flowing away from the bulge on the other side of the earth an adequate explanation for the bulge on the other side of the earth as is the given explantion for diurnal tides.But if you ever mention it to scientists, they will abuse you. Or at least, they abuse me. Maybe it's the way I tell 'em?
Originally posted by John Walker: