Talk:Meteorite Impact in 1178 AD
This information is interesting but leaves me skeptical. The conference where this paper was presented, identified as "SIS" in the heading, was held by the Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, which may have changed its name since. (The S.I.S. Review is now titled Chronology and Catastrophism Review.) SIS seems to have been a magnet for Velikovskians and other, pardon my bluntness, cranks. Leaving aside the bad editing in the author's biography, I could not get through it without giggling:
- EMILIO SPEDICATO born in Milano, graduated in Physics and has been working since 1971 in numerical analysis (linear algebra and optimisation) and applied mathematics. His main work, with Abaffy and Broyden and several Chinese mathematicians, has been the development of the ABS algorithms, which unify the field of algorithms for solving linear algebraic equations and linearly constrained optimisation and provide novel and better methods than their classical counterparts (e.g. the implicit LX algorithm which is generally faster and more accurate and has less storage than the classical best algorithm, Gaussian elimination). Since 1979 he has been involved in the catastrophical reproach of homo sapiens history and related events in the Earth history. He has proposed that Hispaniola was the original location of Atlantis and is working on a project aiming to study mathematically the feasibility of a revised "polar model" approach to the history of the solar system (transition from a configuration with aligned planets in synchronous revolution around the Sun to the present configuration after capture of Jupiter at a time when homo sapiens already inhabited the Earth). He is professor of Operations Research at University of Bergamo.
In short, one begins by suspecting the SIS Conference, goes on to suspect that Mr. Spedicato was on an even footing with the peddlers of weird, exploded theories there, and ends by suspecting everything in his paper, right down to claimed facts.
