My dear fellow, I did do as you suggested, and my head still hurts. However, nowhere in there did I find anything to back up the journalist's claim that the pull you feel when you "swing a bucket of water at the end of rope" is caused by centrifugal force, which is merely a convenient layman's notion, or so I was told in school.
More importantly, the journalist reporting on Gestheyn's findings wrote that "These [centrifugal] forces result from the combined gravitational pull of all the distant stars and planets, Austrian physicist Ernst Mach wrote." I never doubted that there is a "combined gravitational pull of all the distant stars and planets": this has always seemed a given to me because there is no range limitation to gravitational force. However, I always believed that for practical purposes, we earthlings need only take into account the gravitational force exerted by the Earth, the Sun and the Moon. What the journalist is suggesting is the exact opposite.
But as we all know, journalists never lie.
They also tell us that Clinton was a great president and that GWB is an uneducated moron, which I naturally have always taken for the gospel truth.
But if this journalist is not telling the truth then...
Oh my! Please say it isn't so.