One of the speakers aboard the Darwin Caribbean cruise (aka junket) that I just took was Steve Mirsky, a writer for Scientific American. Mirsky gave several lectures, including a report on the recent AAAS meetings in Chicago and a talk about how Scientific American handles articles. Mirsky is a nice guy, and asked to interview me for his Sci Am blog, which we did while sitting on the bed in my cabin. You can find the interview here
; I haven’t listened to it so apologies in advance if I said anything stupid!
Steve Mirsky
I’ve never discussed this with Jerry, but I mention the coral growth ring study each year to my general education students in a class called “Science and Pseudoscience”. In the class we study Immanuel Velikovsky, a psychiatrist who had a crank theory of solar system dynamics that was once mystifyingly popular. He thought that improvements in the calendar made by Near Eastern civilizations were actual increases in the length of a year, rather than increases in our knowledge and ability to make the astronomical observations needed to fix a calendar. Velikovsky thus thought years (in terms of days) were getting longer, having increased in historic times from 360 days to 365+ days. But, as the elegant study Jerry mentioned shows, years have shortened, from 400-some-odd a few hundred million years ago, to the present 365+. GCM
Jerry, on the subject of your book, do you have any idea if it’s going to become more available in Australia? I had no luck finding it in any of my local bookshops, and have put in an order, but it isn’t going to arrive till April at the earliest!