Inflight Science: A Guide to the World from Your Airplane Window - by Brian Clegg

As expected, this was a pleasant, light-weight read, which air travel as an excuse to discuss various scientific topics. I learned some things here and there and had other matters clarified, which is all I might have expected. However, when I read "When Krakatoa erupted in 1883 around 20 cubic kilometres of ash and rock was spewed out by the explosion – the equivalent of a cube of material around 20 kilometres on each side.”, I was perturbed and somewhat lost faith in the author’s integrity. [A cube 20Km on each side would be 8000 cubic Km; a 20 cubic Km cube would be about 2.7Km on each side. Which did he mean?]