LIGO's detection of GWR and "the VETO"

[Ziggurat]

Contrary to popular opinion, general relativity (and all its nonsensical spawns such as gravitational waves) was already vetoed. C.G. Abbot refused to let people debate the construct

Yeah, no. Nobody is in a position to refuse to let people debate scientific theories. General relativity was widely debated. You just don't like the outcome of that debate: the widespread realization that general relativity is by far the most accurate theory for gravity that we have.

Though the force of public opinion, and idolatry, somehow general relativity has survived to genuinely plague the minds of researchers almost 100 years in the future.

That, plus its multiple successful tests.

I admit, special relativity is genuine science, but its half-assed step brother of a theory, general relativity, is a plague of thought. An idea that perpetuates by sheer attention. An idea completely absent any reason. Space bending? Time bending? Pure pseudoscience at its finest.

Your objections are purely subjective. General relativity is 100% scientific. It makes quantifiable, testable predictions. And it passes all those tests. That is as much as we can ever ask of any scientific theory. Your own objections are pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo.

The LIGO contraption probably just detected an electromagnetic disturbance in the atmosphere. Giant metal tubes tend to pick up on those things.

Giant metal tubes tend to shield what's inside them from those things. Do you have any idea, any idea whatsoever, about how LIGO actually works? No, of course you don't. You are as ignorant of LIGO as you are of general relativity.

 

[Dancing David]

The LIGO contraption probably just detected an electromagnetic disturbance in the atmosphere. Giant metal tubes tend to pick up on those things.

Whoosh

 

[hecd2]

However, isn't this a red letter day? Jeffreyw actually engaged with a thread, however incompetently, instead of just spamming his nonsensical ideas.

 

[SelfSim]

Arguably, of greater issue in the recent renewed activity on the LIGO GW discoveries, is the publication of this paper:

Was LIGO’s Gravitational Wave Detection a False Alarm? by authors: Policarpo Yōshin Ulianov, Xiaochun Mei, Ping Yu.

The paper makes the following claims, and then sets about 'proving' them. (How this process is in any way indicative of the Scientific Process, completely escapes me). Summarising:

Section2. Theoretical Evidence That LIGO Cannot Detect Gravitational Waves.

2.1 The Michelson Interferometer Cannot Be Used to Detect Gravitational Waves
2.2. The Results of LIGO’s Experiments Go against the Results of Michelson’s Experiments
2.3. The Formula of General Relativity Was Applied in a Wrong Context
2.4. Electromagnetic Interaction Makes LIGO’s Experiments Impossible
2.5. LIGO’s Experiments Do Not Verify the Theory of General Relativity
2.6. No Singularity Black Holes Were Found
2.7. Interferometer’s Arm Length Variation Is a 1000 Times Less than Nuclear Radius
2.8. The Method of Numerical Relativity Is Unreliable

So, after seeing such headings, the question arises:
"Who on Earth would have actually bothered to publish such an obviously flawed paper?"

The answer turns out to be the subject of an entire Wikipedia entry on "Scientific Research Publishing":

The company has been accused of being a predatory open access publisher and of using email spam to solicit papers for submission. In 2014 there was a mass resignation of the editorial board of one of the company's journals, with the outgoing Editor-in-Chief saying of the publisher "For them it was only about making money. We were simply their 'front'."

So much for the credibility of Mr Mozina's new found evidence in support of his accusations of the LIGO team's:

.. *extreme* case of confirmation bias in its most blatant form.

It seems this paper and its analysis turns out to be a near-perfect example of Mr Mozina's hollow accusations directed at the LIGO team's work.

The paper's (evidently unconcealed) motivation, appears to be for the authors to gain profit, in some way, from their development of a type of data filter ("the Ulianov Whitening Filter with Noise Band-Pass"), which may, or may not be applicable to the LIGO data gathering/detection path:

... the Ulianov Whitening Filter with Noise Band-Pass is a new tool that can be used by the LIGO team to better understand the noise sources in the detectors and can help avoid false detections

If that's not confirming their own confirmation bias, (and a vested interest in the discreditation of LIGO's work), then it would be very surprising.

 

[JeanTate]

I wonder if the author of "Evidence of Gravitational Waves v1.1.pdf" is taking part in Gravity Spy, a Zooniverse crowd sourcing/citizen science project aimed at understanding LIGO's glitches better?

That project's forum (called "Talk") would be a wonderful place to show that the glitch class "chirp" is caused by something atmospherically electric. And also a place to ask questions of experts, re the nature of vetos (or VETOs, or *VETO*s, or ...), and the myriads of sensors etc explicitly designed to capture fields, movements, voltages, vibrations, etc, etc, etc which might correlate with particular glitch classes. Such as those called "Air Compressor (50 Hz)", "Power Line (60 Hz)", "Violin Mode Harmonic", etc. Disclosure: I participate, by classifying and posting.

And I'll end with a shameless plug for Brian Koberlein's One Universe blog post Testing the Electric Universe. Now more than two years' old, and with 444 comments, it demonstrates extremely well that "the Electric Universe" adherents (fanatics, acolytes, fans, ...) have not the slightest interest in actually doing any science. Not even experiments done in laboratories here on Earth.

 

[SelfSim]

I wonder if the author of "Evidence of Gravitational Waves v1.1.pdf" is taking part in Gravity Spy, a Zooniverse crowd sourcing/citizen science project aimed at understanding LIGO's glitches better?

That project's forum (called "Talk") would be a wonderful place to show that the glitch class "chirp" is caused by something atmospherically electric. And also a place to ask questions of experts, re the nature of vetos (or VETOs, or *VETO*s, or ...), and the myriads of sensors etc explicitly designed to capture fields, movements, voltages, vibrations, etc, etc, etc which might correlate with particular glitch classes. Such as those called "Air Compressor (50 Hz)", "Power Line (60 Hz)", "Violin Mode Harmonic", etc. Disclosure: I participate, by classifying and posting.

Interesting ... I notice that 'EcceruElme' (a moderator), from the 'Glitches associated with phone accidentally left plugged in at LHO' responded to this question:

I was under the impression from a previous post that LIGO could not pick up RF signal. If this is the case for me its a break through.
Are you saying it can pick sound waves?

MODERATOR
In reply to mars26's comment
April 8th 2017, 1:03 pm:

Yes, it can pick up sound waves and RF signals as well. RF signals are whistle glitches. This telephone glitch this thread started with is a sound wave.

Presumably, any hypothesised 60 Hz power grid harmonics would be picked up as 'whistle glitches'? These and are clearly already well-characterized and known. So much for the idea of power harmonics permeating the GW wave detection path undistinguished then eh(?)

And I'll end with a shameless plug for Brian Koberlein's One Universe blog post Testing the Electric Universe. Now more than two years' old, and with 444 comments, it demonstrates extremely well that "the Electric Universe" adherents (fanatics, acolytes, fans, ...) have not the slightest interest in actually doing any science. Not even experiments done in laboratories here on Earth.

Koberlein is an honest and ethical web-science commentator who certainly knows how to weed out pseudoscience nonsense very well.

 

[JeanTate]

Some notes I'd written before on MM's document, misplaced, and found just now.

2. Fuzzy Sigma: The author is, I think, well known for having, um, a troubled relationship with mathematics. No surprise then that this section came across to me as incoherent. And I really don't want to spend time trying to dissect it in an effort to make it less coherent.

3. Elimination Of Known And Identified Environmental Influences: More conspiracy theory than science, methinks. A better approach would have been to write to some LIGO team or other and ask questions about the vetos; starting from the position that there are glaring inconsistencies can only lead to (conspiracy theory) confirmation. Ironically "Confirmation Bias" is the title of section 6.

4. Eliminating Blip Transients And Other Probable Non-Vetoed Environmental Causes: Even a few minutes spent at Gravity Spy would be enough for anyone to realize just how irrelevant this section is; Blips do not look like Chirps.

5. Confidence from black hole calculations: I cannot understand this section; it seems to have almost nothing to do with its title, and about the same re the work done by the LIGO consortium.

6. Confirmation Bias: This section seems to reflect the author's fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science (or, in this case, astrophysics).

7. Discussion: More of the same.

I'd be astonished if MM could get this published in a relevant, peer-reviewed journal (in its current form); in fact, I would expect most editors to not even pass it on to any such reviewers. The best I think MM could hope for would be a polite letter suggesting certain (rather sweeping) changes.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Some later notes:

No, Whistles, "a.k.a. Radio Frequency Beat Notes", are unrelated to Power Line (60Hz) glitches. Here's what the Gravity Spy Field Guide says about the former:

Whistles are caused by radio frequency signals (i.e. signals at MHz frequencies) that beat with the LIGO Voltage Controlled Oscillators (VCOs). When the VCO and radio frequency signals are close enough in frequency, the frequency of the resulting beat note, f_beat = |f_VCO - f_RF|, will enter into the LIGO frequency band. Because the VCOs usually have rapidly changing frequencies, f_beat can change quickly, sometimes thousands of Hz in just a second or two.

One thing that comes through loud and clear in MM's document is a rather extreme lack of understanding of LIGO and how it works. For example, "LIGO reports that both detectors have routinely recorded a signal called a blip transient [...] and which also shares similarities with short burst electrical discharge events in the Earth's atmosphere.[4]". The detectors themselves are extraordinarily well shielded from external environment electromagnetic (and mechanical) signals; glitch classes caused by such external environmental events arise due to one or more couplings with equipment (etc) close to detectors (e.g. the VCOs). And of course equipment inside the facility can couple more easily, as with the ringing telephone!

Bringing this back to the 444 comments on Brian Koberlein's excellent blog post: I have often said that whatever "the Electric Universe" is, it is not science. That the official EU discussion forum is apparently quite OK with posts expressing overt acceptance of General Relativity (GR), yet instantly and permantently bans anyone calling the EU pseudoscience, is a good illustration of this. As clearly expressed in some of those 444 comments, acceptance of GR is EU heresy, at least in part because it legitimizes LCDM cosmological models (i.e. the Big Bang really did happen, a super-big EU no-no). Internal consistency is not even on the EU radar, and is also notably absent in MM's document.

 

[JeanTate]

A bit more general background, re GR, "the Electric Universe", etc.

A widespread misconception about GR, one that extends well beyond EU fans, is that the existence (or not) of CDM (cold, dark (non-baryonic) matter) is somehow an observational test of GR, one which it has failed. Phillip Helbig's comment on the recent BackReAction blog post "Is Verlinde’s Emergent Gravity compatible with General Relativity?" (link) is as succinct as can be (it's the one timestamped 5:12 AM, March 15, 2017):

GR says absolutely nothing about sources. What do you expect? That GR says "these baryons exist, and here are their masses and number densities"?

As to alternative theories, if all they do is explain known facts, then they are not falsifiable.

The whole post+72 comments is well worth a read; the misconception re GR is Tam Hunt's (but not only his).

That EU acolytes do not read primary sources (i.e. papers published in relevant peer-reviewed journals, grad-level textbooks) is well-known. For them, PRs, popsci pieces, and YT vids are primary sources; yep, whatever the EU is, it most certainly isn't science. An excellent example of this can be found among the 444 comments on Brian Koberlein's Testing the Electric Universe: search for Aardwolf, and read the associated comments ... the discussion is on how the Hipparcos mission derived parallaxes from the raw data (he cites, as primary sources, blog posts, PR pieces, popsci articles ... but not peer-reviewed papers).

The 444 comments also provide several illustrations of "Cafeteria Science", "Modular Science", and "Pareidola Science", "to describe the methods of an EU zealot" (as sjastro says). This is one of the manifestations of the absence of internal consistency in the EU, one of the obvious features which make it not even pseudoscience. It is an approach which I think can be found throughout MM's document, perhaps most prominent in sections 5 and 6. Another example: Eddington's calculation showing that, if thermalized, the observable universe's starlight would have a temperature ~the same as that of the CMB. Right ... leave aside truck-loads of other problems with this (irrelevant if you're into Cafeteria Science ), did any EU groupie stop to wonder "if the starlight is thermalized, how come we can still see stars, even at very high redshift?"

 

[SelfSim]

... Some later notes:

No, Whistles, "a.k.a. Radio Frequency Beat Notes", are unrelated to Power Line (60Hz) glitches. Here's what the Gravity Spy Field Guide says about the former:

Whistles are caused by radio frequency signals (i.e. signals at MHz frequencies) that beat with the LIGO Voltage Controlled Oscillators (VCOs). When the VCO and radio frequency signals are close enough in frequency, the frequency of the resulting beat note, f_beat = |f_VCO - f_RF|, will enter into the LIGO frequency band. Because the VCOs usually have rapidly changing frequencies, f_beat can change quickly, sometimes thousands of Hz in just a second or two.

Right .. I haven't quite explored the 'Gravity Spy' forum. Harmonics of 60Hz would have a hard time reaching the MHz range anyway. So 'Power Line 60Hz' glitch class it is!

One thing that comes through loud and clear in MM's document is a rather extreme lack of understanding of LIGO and how it works. For example, "LIGO reports that both detectors have routinely recorded a signal called a blip transient [...] and which also shares similarities with short burst electrical discharge events in the Earth's atmosphere.[4]".

The detectors themselves are extraordinarily well shielded from external environment electromagnetic (and mechanical) signals; glitch classes caused by such external environmental events arise due to one or more couplings with equipment (etc) close to detectors (e.g. the VCOs). And of course equipment inside the facility can couple more easily, as with the ringing telephone!

Yep .. I agree. Also, (as was explained to MM soo long ago): according to the Berry site, there was a lightning strike over Burkino Faso during the passage of the first GW signal. This 'Schumann resonance' was a thousand times too small to explain the amplitude of the measured h(t). At the time, MM was asserting that a way far weaker atmospheric 'Whistler wave' had affected the detected signal. This would have been even more orders of magnitude smaller again, and would have paled into insignificance in comparison with the eventual h(t) GW detection.

Even assuming for a moment that a 'Whistler wave' might have been somehow strong enough for detection. Since they are caused by the acceleration of charges in local atmospheric plasma, the wave strength drops off as an inverse cube law. Since there was a time delay of the signal between stations, the source origin was clearly not equidistant to the stations. As local atmospheric disturbances are formed in the Earth’s ionosphere, the wave intensity reaching the stations would have been different (because it was evidently not equidistant), which would have produced different amplitude/intensity readings at each LIGO station (it wasn't).

Bringing this back to the 444 comments on Brian Koberlein's excellent blog post: I have often said that whatever "the Electric Universe" is, it is not science. That the official EU discussion forum is apparently quite OK with posts expressing overt acceptance of General Relativity (GR), yet instantly and permantently bans anyone calling the EU pseudoscience, is a good illustration of this. As clearly expressed in some of those 444 comments, acceptance of GR is EU heresy, at least in part because it legitimizes LCDM cosmological models (i.e. the Big Bang really did happen, a super-big EU no-no). Internal consistency is not even on the EU radar, and is also notably absent in MM's document.

Its interesting to note also that supposedly 'soundly worded deleted rebuttals' were clearly not deleted by Koberlein (if these were composed by MM and his cohorts). I would suggest that Brian probably left theirs standing because they demonstrated the amateurishness of the EU thinking (which I guess also supports his overall blog thread theme).

Koberlein's policy is to delete or alter the odd comment, if offensive. Even if a poster is banned, (ie: MM), their posts still remain, probably as a testimony as to why they were banned in the first place!

 

[SelfSim]

'Fuzzy Sigma'

Fuzzy Sigma: The author is, I think, well known for having, um, a troubled relationship with mathematics. No surprise then that this section came across to me as incoherent. And I really don't want to spend time trying to dissect it in an effort to make it less coherent.

As was explained to MM in our ridiculously long CRUS GW thread, the 'sigma' relates to statistical background noise in the absence of any extraneous noise including the GW signal itself. It seems this went completely over his head so he then decided to invent his own story of what 'sigma' is.

It comes as no big surprising that his paper immediately found its way to the 'junk pile', as I can't see why a reviewer would waste their time correcting the most basic errors.

 

[SelfSim]

Overall 'Gripes'

The point came to mind that MM's gripe about how the non-visually emitting cause (BHs inspiralling), whilst providing no observables other than h(t), in fact does have supporting evidence coming from theory. This is surely why LIGO considers eliminating all known local causes (based on lack of evidence for them), and whatever is left, ie: the theoretical possibility of BH inspiralling GWs, is following a perfectly legitimate scientific process. This is not the same as what MM is complaining about, because there is theoretical evidence, which is of course, completely ignored by EU acolytes (and MM).

There are so many reasons as to why the lack of a visual event doesn’t impact on the validity of the discovery:

i) An associated electromagnetic (visual) event isn’t compulsory if the BH merger occurs in the absence an accretion disk. Also BH mergers don’t produce bright gamma ray bursts, as this would require that one or both objects, would have to be neutron star(s);

ii) As MM himself admits, to accurately pinpoint the source requires more than two GW detectors;

iii) If the visual event is faint then it falls within the range of large observatory telescopes. Observatory telescopes only cover a limited region of the sky and the probability of a visual GW event falling within the field of view of a CCD detector must be very small;

iv) The gravitational wave strain amplitude falls off as an inverse distance function and visual brightness, as inverse distance squared. Hence for large distances, the visual brightness can fall below detection limits, no(?)

 

[SelfSim]

Reason for Veto Removal:

Oh, and for the record, LIGO has already disclosed the reasons for the Veto removal, (in spite of MM's denials/misunderstandings of what is clearly stated in the quote below):

From page 10 LIGO Magazine Issue 8 ..

At 11:23:20 UTC, an analyst follow-up determined which auxiliary channels were associated with iDQ’s decision. It became clear that these were uncalibrated versions of h(t) which had not been flagged as “unsafe” and were only added to the set of available low latency channels after the start of ER8. Based on the safety of the channels, the Data Quality Veto label was removed within 2.5 hours and analyses proceeded after re-starting by hand.

 

[JeanTate]

And ... dare I revive JT's thread with Mr Mozina's latest rant from 'the house of all things electric'?

This time, he's actually written up his gripes and decided to:



Apart from regurgitating the same nonsense from our marathon CRUS/CFs thread, he appears to be totally oblivious that LIGO also found a second Gravitational Wave a few months after the initial discovery.

(One would think, following his initial meaningless campaign, that at least he would move on ... just a little(?) .. and attempt to demonstrate how his accusations might pertain to the second discovery as well?)

(bold added)

I forgot to comment on this part.

MM certainly knew of this second detection (or should have known); that this is not covered in his document is ... strange. After all, it goes to the heart of this sections 5 ("Confidence from black hole calculations") and 6 ("Confirmation Bias"), does it not? Besides, it's the sort of thing a reviewer would likely pick up on, so why ignore it?

 

[JeanTate]

However, isn't this a red letter day? Jeffreyw actually engaged with a thread, however incompetently, instead of just spamming his nonsensical ideas.

Skipped over this too ... yes, it's a very welcome change in his posting pattern.

Now, about the content ...

 

[JeanTate]

Right .. I haven't quite explored the 'Gravity Spy' forum. Harmonics of 60Hz would have a hard time reaching the MHz range anyway. So 'Power Line 60Hz' glitch class it is!

The glitches displayed in Gravity Spy are sonograms, with time on the x-axis, and frequency on the y, with a logarithmic scale. The max frequency is ~2k Hz, and Whistles are typically between ~400 and 1800 Hz. These are the beat frequencies between MHz radio signals and the VCO's ones.

Yep .. I agree. Also, (as was explained to MM soo long ago): according to the Berry site, there was a lightning strike over Burkino Faso during the passage of the first GW signal. This 'Schumann resonance' was a thousand times too small to explain the amplitude of the measured h(t). At the time, MM was asserting that a way far weaker atmospheric 'Whistler wave' had affected the detected signal. This would have been even more orders of magnitude smaller again, and would have paled into insignificance in comparison with the eventual h(t) GW detection.

Even assuming for a moment that a 'Whistler wave' might have been somehow strong enough for detection. Since they are caused by the acceleration of charges in local atmospheric plasma, the wave strength drops off as an inverse cube law. Since there was a time delay of the signal between stations, the source origin was clearly not equidistant to the stations. As local atmospheric disturbances are formed in the Earth’s ionosphere, the wave intensity reaching the stations would have been different (because it was evidently not equidistant), which would have produced different amplitude/intensity readings at each LIGO station (it wasn't).

To a hammer, everything is a nail ...

Its interesting to note also that supposedly 'soundly worded deleted rebuttals' were clearly not deleted by Koberlein (if these were composed by MM and his cohorts). I would suggest that Brian probably left theirs standing because they demonstrated the amateurishness of the EU thinking (which I guess also supports his overall blog thread theme).

Koberlein's policy is to delete or alter the odd comment, if offensive. Even if a poster is banned, (ie: MM), their posts still remain, probably as a testimony as to why they were banned in the first place!

I think Brian says, in one of the 444 comments, that his policy is to never edit ... posted comments appear as written (including typos etc), or they do not appear.

Also - this is a guess - I think there's no deleting of comments which appear; I think he has 'moderation on' for all new commenters (so an unacceptable one, e.g. spam, is never displayed). I suppose that, every now and then, a 'white list' commenter says something beyond the pale, and Brian has to delete it, but I think it's very rare.

He also seems to have an admirable approach, not dissimilar to that of Phil Plait in the original Bad Astronomy forum: if your commenting history shows you continue to ignore what Brian posts in response, you will likely be quickly banned.

And yes, leaving the pro-EU posts in the 444 does serve as a wonderful educational resource ... as many who have dropped by (and read!) have said.

 

[JeanTate]

The point came to mind that MM's gripe about how the non-visually emitting cause (BHs inspiralling), whilst providing no observables other than h(t), in fact does have supporting evidence coming from theory. This is surely why LIGO considers eliminating all known local causes (based on lack of evidence for them), and whatever is left, ie: the theoretical possibility of BH inspiralling GWs, is following a perfectly legitimate scientific process. This is not the same as what MM is complaining about, because there is theoretical evidence, which is of course, completely ignored by EU acolytes (and MM).

This is particular appropriate, considering that indirect detection of GWR is well-attested (and got Hulse and Taylor their Nobels). Further, the GWR waveform of an inspiral is relatively easy to calculate (from theory), and is very distinctive.

AFAIK, no other source of GWR has been indirectly detected, and other proposed sources do not have such easily derived GWR waveforms (well, I guess a 'neutron star mountain' might). This makes detecting them more difficult; I guess the best chance - within the frequency range LIGO is sensitive to - would be a nearby asymmetric supernova, which would have the added benefit of being easily observable.

There are so many reasons as to why the lack of a visual event doesn’t impact on the validity of the discovery:

i) An associated electromagnetic (visual) event isn’t compulsory if the BH merger occurs in the absence an accretion disk. Also BH mergers don’t produce bright gamma ray bursts, as this would require that one or both objects, would have to be neutron star(s);

ii) As MM himself admits, to accurately pinpoint the source requires more than two GW detectors;

iii) If the visual event is faint then it falls within the range of large observatory telescopes. Observatory telescopes only cover a limited region of the sky and the probability of a visual GW event falling within the field of view of a CCD detector must be very small;

iv) The gravitational wave strain amplitude falls off as an inverse distance function and visual brightness, as inverse distance squared. Hence for large distances, the visual brightness can fall below detection limits, no(?)

Yes, to all of those.

You can also add that rather a lot of interesting things, astrophysics-wise, are not easily visible due to dust, either in our own galaxy or the host one. On top of that, there's source confusion ... parts of the sky where there are vast numbers of sources (e.g. stars in the plane of the Milky Way).

 

[SelfSim]

(bold added)

I forgot to comment on this part.

MM certainly knew of this second detection (or should have known); that this is not covered in his document is ... strange. After all, it goes to the heart of this sections 5 ("Confidence from black hole calculations") and 6 ("Confirmation Bias"), does it not? Besides, it's the sort of thing a reviewer would likely pick up on, so why ignore it?

Yes .. its an obvious question which is completely unanswered in his paper.
Subsequent foot-shuffling and pointing at other questionable papers, is yet another diversionary tactic aimed at covering up the oversight in his original paper, (IMO).

(MM frequently practises such tactics ... he seems to assume others can't see through it for some strange reason ..)

 

[SelfSim]

The glitches displayed in Gravity Spy are sonograms, with time on the x-axis, and frequency on the y, with a logarithmic scale. The max frequency is ~2k Hz, and Whistles are typically between ~400 and 1800 Hz. These are the beat frequencies between MHz radio signals and the VCO's ones.

Yes the purpose of characterising (and classifying) the attributes of these sonograms from known sources, is surely to provide a high statistical probability that they aren't involved when declaring detections of signals from GW sources. For example, IIRC, blip transients were already characterised when the first signal was detected (and was included in the LIGO report as being similar, but quite distinct from the first GW150914 event, and the subsequent GW151226 event too, I think?)

To a hammer, everything is a nail ...

An undirected hammer is pretty useless though .. (expect, maybe, for hitting the user's own thumb).

I think Brian says, in one of the 444 comments, that his policy is to never edit ... posted comments appear as written (including typos etc), or they do not appear.

Also - this is a guess - I think there's no deleting of comments which appear; I think he has 'moderation on' for all new commenters (so an unacceptable one, e.g. spam, is never displayed). I suppose that, every now and then, a 'white list' commenter says something beyond the pale, and Brian has to delete it, but I think it's very rare.

He also seems to have an admirable approach, not dissimilar to that of Phil Plait in the original Bad Astronomy forum: if your commenting history shows you continue to ignore what Brian posts in response, you will likely be quickly banned.

And yes, leaving the pro-EU posts in the 444 does serve as a wonderful educational resource ... as many who have dropped by (and read!) have said.

Yes .. the argument by repetition, when used as an 'assault weapon', (as it often is by certain EU zealots), requires the 'stronger measures' you mention.

 

[SelfSim]

This is particular appropriate, considering that indirect detection of GWR is well-attested (and got Hulse and Taylor their Nobels). Further, the GWR waveform of an inspiral is relatively easy to calculate (from theory), and is very distinctive.

AFAIK, no other source of GWR has been indirectly detected, and other proposed sources do not have such easily derived GWR waveforms (well, I guess a 'neutron star mountain' might). This makes detecting them more difficult; I guess the best chance - within the frequency range LIGO is sensitive to - would be a nearby asymmetric supernova, which would have the added benefit of being easily observable.
...
Yes, to all of those.

You can also add that rather a lot of interesting things, astrophysics-wise, are not easily visible due to dust, either in our own galaxy or the host one. On top of that, there's source confusion ... parts of the sky where there are vast numbers of sources (e.g. stars in the plane of the Milky Way).

Yes .. and overall, it seems completely ridiculuous to downplay, (or completely ignore), the entire backdrop which underpins the design of the LIGO observatories when, lo and behold, it detects exactly what it was tuned to detect!

A reasonable onlooker who has not been intimately involved in all of the various design decisions, who then reads news of a detection, would surely not typically assume a position of being an authority on the process used in detecting it(?) The reports issued by the LIGO team were intended for a peer-review audience .. and not an audience seeking to justify their own conspiracy theories and beliefs (such as the veto over-ride conspiracy theory).
The latter folks should be trying to quantify and justify from theory, the generation of neutrinos in their own pet solar models (for eg).
I'm pretty sure Brian (and the rest of us) would be interested in actually seeing such a formally articulated (and agreed) EU solar model in the first place! Tom Bridgman attempted to address all the models he was aware of, and still awaits answers to his challenges AFAIK. (Apologies .. I'm pretty sure you're already aware of this anyway).
(I have also seen such challenges put to the TBolts forum in the past, and the poor poster was summarily banned for pointing out that the lack of such an objectified model left the EU exposed to accusations of pseudoscience. So much for being open to constructive criticism!)

 

[SelfSim]

There is more to say on the following interchange:

(bold added)

I forgot to comment on this part.

MM certainly knew of this second detection (or should have known); that this is not covered in his document is ... strange. After all, it goes to the heart of this sections 5 ("Confidence from black hole calculations") and 6 ("Confirmation Bias"), does it not? Besides, it's the sort of thing a reviewer would likely pick up on, so why ignore it?

Yes .. its an obvious question which is completely unanswered in his paper.
Subsequent foot-shuffling and pointing at other questionable papers, is yet another diversionary tactic aimed at covering up the oversight in his original paper, (IMO).

(MM frequently practises such tactics ... he seems to assume others can't see through it for some strange reason ..)

Somewhat amusingly, the Ulianov etal paper referenced by MM in support of his revised feelings on what LIGO detected, (ie: speculation that a power grid issue affected the GW signal detection), actually contains virtually opposing views to those articulated by MM in his own paper!

For example:

i) Ulianov etal have stated, in no uncertain terms, that LIGO's mainstream GR and numerical relativity interpretations are wrong. However MM has stated he accepts GR theory.

ii) Ulianov etal seem to think the power grid issue is the result of a technical oversight. MM, on the other hand, claims it’s due to LIGO's incompetence/dishonesty.

It is easy to conclude from the above contradictions that the Ulianov etal paper, seems to be yet another afterthought by MM, (ie: akin to his previous 'whistler waves' one), rather than his rather dishonest portrayal of the paper somehow being central to his own ideas(?)