The Gauquelin-Shanks Statistics

[Jim Eshelman]

January 4, 1980 was the tenth anniversary of Cyril Fagan's death. Entirely by coincidence, I was in San Diego that day working with Neil Michelsen (from whom I would later accept a job) preparing The American Sidereal Ephemeris for publication. I thought I knew more or less what the day would look like... and I got a surprise.

Michel and Francoise Gauquelin had taken to spending several months a year in San Diego, as Neil's guests - renting a house half a block away and using the computer resources of Astro Computing Services for their research. Tom Shanks wrote and executed the statistical analysis programs and IIRC designed the very clever way of generating synthetic control groups for finding expected probabilities. I'd been told Michel wanted to see me, and about 2:00 PM I walked up the half block slope to find Tom and Michel sitting around a small table in lovely European-flavored breakfast nook.

A pile of computer output was in front of them... and, rather than tell you the story step by step, I'll get to the punch line. Michel had asked Tom to recalculate the professional and character trait data from the Gauquelin collection all over from scratch - this time using the Sidereal zodiac.

This couple of inches of oversized computer output proved to be the single most exciting intellectual wonder of my life. I spent hours upon days upon weeks going through its pages, copying off statistically significant results, and analyzing them. I gave an occasional short talk on the findings. I've mentioned them here and there, and dropped them into various posts in the Constellations section of this forum. But I've never had an easy way to show the whole package, the larger framework.

The original computer output is still in storage somewhere, but today I found the folder where I had typed (yes, on a typewriter) the statistically significant part of the material. I'm going to start typing it again - this time in Microsoft Word - so I can permanently unfurl them.

I envisioned a three-part (or, possibly, a smaller fourth part) article series. The outline for the article series is still in the folder with the other typed papers. I finished Part 1, and you can read it here:
http://solunars.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5

I never actually wrote the remainder of the articles, though I have them outlined. I discussed the three-parter with American Astrology, and submitted the first installment: They didn't want to commit to publishing until I finished the whole thing.

My first step will be to secure the numbers themselves - get them typed. However, they also require commentary. The raw output may stir lots of questions that the commentary eventually will answer (it certainly stirred questions in me while I was going!). I will work on this in layers, to maximize the chance of my getting the most important stuff complete.