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Astrology |
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WARNING: some people may find what he says to be offensive (particularly those who have a soft spot for astrology) |
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Also, do you realise you've probably been lied to regarding which sign you are? |
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Skeptic
Etiquette In the face of my very scientifically brilliant co-bloggers, this post might seem ridonkulously dumb, but this problem has been weighing heavy on my mind, and I'm trying to work it out. From here 30 Jan 2009 My neighbors and I once shared a community garden in Los Feliz. It was a small space in the back of our building that had once been filled with trash, broken furniture, and decades of rotting cigarette filters. We decided to pool our resources and plant a garden. We salvaged some drawers from a broken bureau and grabbed some wine boxes from the local liquor store to repurpose as makeshift planters. Over time, we refinished a picnic table, purchased a barbecue grill, and ran electricity out to the patio and hung Christmas lights along the ivy on the back wall so we could actually see each other after sunset. Normally, my friends are the product of a shared common ground in ideals, beliefs, and hair care products. Neighbor-friends are solely the product of shared geography, and they are therefore more likely to shock the shit out of me with firmly held ideas and beliefs that I find bizarre, and sometimes physically harmful. For example, there was the time I woke to find a dirty hippie standing in the hall outside my apartment door with a cooler full of raw bison liver, promising to cure my neighbor’s Lyme Disease, naturally. Enraged, I glared at the crunchy bastard as he took her last $70 as she melted against the wall in exhaustion, having given up her antibiotics due to a weird distrust of “western medicine.” Eventually, she tried exorcism (to which my only reply was, “Uh, don’t you have to be Catholic for that?” because seriously, what else can you say?), but that didn’t work any better than the mystical healing meat. She’s okay, now. Back on the antibiotics, and thriving. But if I see the hippie and his cooler of magic meat ever again, I’m going to punch him in the throat and drown him in disinfectant. Jerk. But aside from the rare-meat life-threatening stuff, most of my magic/god/meat-cure social problems are etiquette-based. What exactly is the polite response when someone at a dinner party asks, “What’s your sign? I bet you’re a Taurus!” The last time this question came up was at birthday celebration with my neighbors, at the bottom of the third bottle of wine at a tapas bar. After listening thoughtfully to my dinner companions each explain how they were like their signs, it was my turn to answer. I said, “You do realize that Jupiter and some random stars have no effect at all on you, right? I mean, why is it that you’re protected from the magical personality rays of the constellations when you’re buried a few inches deep in flesh and fat, but the second you come screaming out of your mom, the magical personality rays pierce through the brick, mortar, insulation, tile, and electrical wiring of to the third floor maternity ward of the hospital in which you have emerged to touch you with the magical essence of “Taurus,” you stubborn little baby bull!” I am a bummer at parties. No one was any more skeptical of astrology, and I ended up looking like the big jerk I actually am. So I’m trying to develop a personal etiquette code for situations such as this. I consulted Jillian Venters of Gothic Charm School to help me with a skeptic’s etiquette plan, and presented her with my current options: Question: What’s your sign? I bet you’re a Taurus! Response Options: AWKWARD AND POLITE: “Aries, I guess. I don’t believe in astrology, so, um, how ‘bout those Mets?” SNARKY AND SATISFYING: “What’s your religion? I bet you’re an Episcopalian!” ITCHING FOR AN UGLY END TO DINNER: “You know that astrology is horseshit, right? What are you, a moron?” OMG U R SO WEIRD: (I make up my own “sign,” stringing together random celestial objects) “I’m a Boötesian, with Pleiades rising. I am so totally fucked this week because Haumea is in retrograde. Stupid Kuiper Belt. I wish they had never discovered it.” “Personally, I'd got with a combination of 1, 2, and 4, because I'm wacky that way,” says Jilli. “I have friends who believe LOTS of things I don't, and ... I guess I try to honor other people's crazy and quirks the way I'd like them to honor mine. So I'd probably say, ‘I don't believe in astrology’, and if they pushed the subject I'd counter with, ‘Look, I really don't believe in it, and nothing you say is going to change my mind. Let's not talk about it.’” “Of course, knowing me, I'd probably go on to talk about it, and try and get them to explain to me WHY they believe. Because, y'know, people are freaky and interesting, even if I privately think some of their beliefs are whackaloon.” Jillian’s point here is a good one. People really ARE freaky and interesting, and I’d hate to pass up an opportunity to do my own personal sociological study on freakiness. Perhaps I can apply for some sort of research grant. Both the Lady of the Manners and I ended up agreeing that option #4 was the best, not for any particular etiquette reason, but because it’s weirdly zany and charming. Sometimes it’s best to answer Crazy Talk with more Crazy Talk. The key is to sound sincere. There’s a thin line between cleverly ironic and smarmy assholishness. But it isn’t just astrology where I find myself on the edge of turning an otherwise pleasant conversation into prison riot. A friend I genuinely care about once spent $700 on astral-projection classes. It’s not just astrology conversations where I feel awkward and left out. One of my neighbors joined me for a drink one night and launched into an excited explanation of astral-projection. She had spent close to a grand on classes and had her first out-of-body experience. I have no poker face. None. It’s not that she didn’t have the money for such things, she makes plenty of dough and could just have easily spent it on new shoes without hurting her savings account. But she wanted to talk about this revelation, and my response was, “Sweetie, you had a hallucination. You paid a ridiculous sum of money to have a hallucination. You can get a bag of ‘shrooms for a tenth of what you just spent, and had enough cash left over to buy new shoes, too!” This devolved into an argument on the “science” of astral-projection, and she swore that she has read many studies on how it is a fact, A FACT, that one’s mind can ski on out of one’s body and, I dunno, look up ladies’ skirts on the escalator at the mall. The end result was that I promised to eat the full contents of my cat’s litter box if any of these “studies” could be repeated in an independent laboratory. Gah. I hope that never happens. I’m really lazy about cleaning the litter box. Once again, I turned to Jilli for an appropriate response to, “I just spent a grand on an astral projection class and had my first out-of-body experience!” “Yeah, I guess congratulations would be in order,” says Jilli. “And then probably an attempt to change the subject, because if you don't, the person will probably gush enthusiastically at you all about the astral projection class, and then you're stuck with nodding a lot and biting your tongue.” Jilli’s advice is different if the friend in question is actually going into debt on such things: “Sit down with them privately and say ‘Look, I understand you're seeking something, but I am worried about you being duped out of money and self-esteem that you shouldn't lose’. Try to explain why you're concerned, and maybe give them suggestions of other ways they can seek out answers without dropping huge amounts of cash? Most public libraries have a pretty good metaphysical/occult/New Age/spooky-pants section, and I would *strongly* encourage someone to investigate all of that before spending huge amounts of money for someone to hand enlightenment to them.” Disclaimer: I’m not talking about when someone you love has just spent their retirement savings on a handful of magic beans. That sort of thing isn’t about etiquette, it’s about intervention. People who drain their bank accounts trying to attain access to magic have a problem akin to gambling, and I’m not equating random frivolous trips to a palm reader with taking out a second mortgage to gain “clarity” at the Scientology center on Sunset. My neighbor Michelle is one of my most favorite people. She brings me soup when I am sick, feeds my cat when I am out of town, and is otherwise a wonderful friend. She’s also ridiculously superstitious and quickly falls prey to any scam that promises to cleanse her body of toxins or clarify her soul. I steer her away from things like Kinoki Foot Pads and The Secret, and she cuts my hair for free. Michelle is convinced a ghost is turning the lights on and off in her kitchen. Michelle sees ghosts and troubled spirits in every electrical problem and broken radio. I once told her that the sun will eventually go all red giant and scorch all evidence of humanity off the planet, and what will the ghosts do then? Haunt the ashes? Won’t that be really lame for the ghosts? She laughs at me, and I laugh at her, and then we start making supper out in the community garden, tossing fresh asparagus in lemon juice and garlic. “But dude! An OLD LADY DIED in that apartment!” she exclaims. “DUDE! Something like SEVENTY BILLION PEOPLE died since the dawn of humanity. An OLD LADY DIED EVERYWHERE!” I holler. Then we laugh again. I’m never going to convince her that her ghost is crappy wiring, and she’s never going to convince me that the dead return to life just to fuck with the ambient lighting schemes of aging hipsters like us. These differences in beliefs don’t matter to me, really. Not in the grand scheme of a friendship with someone who comforts me when I’m going bananas, and genuinely cares for me. Michelle is my only wacky-belief friend who has ever asked why I don’t believe in god, astral-projection, ghosts, or kinoki foot pads, and it is one of the many reasons why I love her. Sometimes I think Michelle needs to believe in the supernatural, because she doesn’t really know how much there actually IS of the natural world to be dazzled by. No faith is required, just your own two eyes to see and hands to feel. I told her that the universe is wonderful enough on its own. Space, stars, planets, black holes, galaxies, suns. The fact that out of all the elemental soup, people like us have evolved to walk and talk and create art, music, white wine, patent leather stacked mary jane shoes, Cocoa Puffs cereal, truck nutz, chocolate chip cookies, surf boards, and the Neiman Marcus cosmetics department is AMAZING. All by itself. Saying, “god did it” is heartbreaking. It pisses on the sheer wonderousness of it all, you know? I don’t need more. The universe doesn’t need to be imbued with the mystical to make it “more” special. It’s like salting a pot of soup in someone else’s kitchen without permission. It’s awfully presumptuous, and, well, more than a little rude. |
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It's all very well to attempt to be scientifically correct in ones'
statements, but how is the man on the street going to interpret the words
below...? Some academics are so out of
touch, you'd swear they live on Mars! Scientists dump cold water on astrology Leo the Lion and his 11 other signs of the zodiac don't define your personality, a new study shows. Jennifer Viegas Discovery News Tuesday, 25 April 2006 One of the largest studies of the possible link between human traits and astrology has found little, if any, connection between the traditional Sun signs of the zodiac and people's characteristics. The study adds to the growing body of evidence that there is no scientific basis for star signs, like Aries and Taurus, signs that are based on the place of the Sun in relation to someone's date of birth. But the researchers leave open the question as to whether other, more detailed and personal forms of astrology hold any validity. "When considering the current scientific standing with respect to Sun signs, it becomes clear that there is little or no truth in [them]," says Dr Peter Hartmann, who led the study in the May issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences. "This does not necessarily mean that all astrology is without truth, but only that the independent effect of Sun signs is most likely to be irrelevant," says Hartmann, a researcher in the Department of Psychology at Denmark's University of Aarhus. "As for the weekly horoscope based on mere Sun signs, then according to the current scientific standing, there is probably more truth in the comic strips." Hartmann and his colleagues used computer analysis and statistical methods to study possible astrological connections between over 15,000 individuals. Their test subjects came from two sources. The first was the Vietnam Experience Study, which gathered information about intelligence, personality and date of birth for male military veterans. The second was the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth, which included intelligence and date of birth information for males and females aged between 15 and 24 years. If connections existed over a rate of 5%, they were considered valid and not the result of random links. No link in Vietnam The scientists could find no relationship between the time and date of a person's birth and their personality traits, which the Vietnam study categorised using terms such as psychoticism, extraversion, neuroticism and social desirability. The researchers, however, did determine that individuals from the Vietnam test who were born between the months of July and December were slightly more intelligent, by less than one IQ point, than those who were born between January to June. That finding was reversed for the 1979 youth study. In that case, people who were born January to June had the minute intellectual edge. And in the real world? Hartmann says that although the information about intelligence passed the non-random restriction, he views the connection as irrelevant. "Assuming that you could buy a pill that would increase your IQ with one point, but it would cost you $10,000, would you do it? Probably not, but if you could buy a pill that would increase your IQ by 15 points that would be something else, simply because you get more value for your money," he says. "The essence here is that there is a difference in determining whether a result is significant, hence whether it is a true effect, or just random occurrence, and then whether this significant effect is relevant and of any interest." The Australian connection Geoffrey Dean, a former astrologist based in Australia who researches the possible scientific validity of astrology, tracked over 2000 people who were born within minutes of each other. The study, which spanned several decades, covered over 100 different characteristics, like marital status, IQ, anxiety and temperament was published in 2003 in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. Dean came to a similar conclusion as Hartmann and his team, that date of birth does not affect an individual's personality. |
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In Medieval times, someone suffering from symptoms of the black death was encouraged to find a good barber surgeon who knew what he was doing when it came to bloodletting. If the Moon was in the Zodiac ruling a particular part of the body, bloodletting from that part of the body was to be avoided, as the attraction of the Moon could cause excessive bleeding. Here is an image of a medieval 'Zodiac Man' showing the parts of the body governed by the various signs of the Zodiac. - contributed by Medieval historian Ruth Catherine Semple |
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| There is nothing written in the stars! Astrology fails scientific mega test A detailed scientific long-term study by researchers in Britain proves the central principle of astrology invalid and baseless. It puts an end to the fantastic old claim that the constellation of stars and planets at the time of birth could influence or even determine the development of an individual's character and course of life. The "Time Twin Study" was started in London in 1958 as a medical research project. Registering more than 2,000 babies, born within minutes of each other on a day in early March, it had the objective to compare the time twins' health development. The field of investigation was soon extended. The research team monitored the test persons over several decades, recording observations about more than 100 parameters in connection with health, occupation, marital situation, anxiety level, aggressiveness, sociability, IQ levels, abilities in music, art, sport, mathematics, language etc. They tried to collect evidences for similarities between the time twins. However, no similarities could be identified. "The test conditions could hardly have been more conducive to success but the results are uniformly negative", stated Dr. Geoffrey Dean, astrologer turned scientist from Perth, Australia, in a report about the study, published in the current issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. Carrying out an analysis of the study, Dr. Dean and his collegue Prof. Ivan Kelley, Psychologist at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, found that there was no special trait or tendency shared by the time twins. They were just as different as people born on any other day under any other planetary constellation. The claim that stars and planets could influence character and life of human beings has long been dismissed by rationalists and scientists as there is according to all known scientific principles no kind of mechanism imaginable by way of which this influence could possibly work. Here is empirical proof that it does not work at all. The study shows clearly that astrological predictions based on the coordinates of birth do not correspond with reality. They are nothing but exercises in deception. This should be the end of one of the oldest superstitions. But it is not hard to predict that the show will still go on. There are obviously too many people, who like to be deceived and too many, who make enormous money by deceiving them. Source: www.rationalistinternational.net/article/20030827_1_en.htm |
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DARK ENERGY ASTROLOGY The story below just broke yesterday in the Sunday Times, in which British Royal Astronomical Society astronomer Dr. Percy Seymour has published a book presenting a theory to explain astrology. I have not seen the book yet, but the problem with proffering a new mechanism to explain the power of astrology, is that Seymour is assuming there is something that needs to be explained. There isn't. Astrology does not work, plain and simple:
In short, a theory is superfluous when there is nothing for the theory to explain. This is why James Randi's million-dollar prize (www.randi.org) is not interested in hearing about the theories behind astrology or ESP or telekinesis and the like. As Randi always says, "I just want to know if it works or not." Once a phenomenon has been proven to be real, then we can work on the theory to explain how it works. Astrology does not work, so it doesn't matter whether the earth's magnetic field influences our brains in the womb or not (Seymour's theory), or whether gravity influences us (the usual theory), or some future conjecture (why not dark energy, or dark matter, since together they make up 95% of the universe?). How about a new branch of astrology? We'll call it Dark Energy Astrology. Since Dark Energy is an anti-gravity force apparently causing the cosmos to expand at an accelerating rate, this form of astrology causes people to do the opposite of what they would normally do, like the bizarro Seinfeld episode where George, who is fat, balding, jobless, and living with his parents, suddenly becomes irresistable to beautiful women. Dark Energy Astrology. My next book. Publishers are standing by....
THE PLANETS may control your future after all. A renowned astronomer has broken with scientific orthodoxy to claim that astrology could have some basis in fact. Long dismissed as little better than fortune telling, astrology has been attacked as a pseudo-science by the Royal Astronomical Society. But one of its members, Dr Percy Seymour, has reopened the debate with a provocative book claiming movements of the sun, stars and planets can influence the brains of unborn children in measurable ways. Seymour is a former principal lecturer in astronomy and astrophysics at Plymouth University who has been a researcher at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. While stressing he has no time for star-sign horoscopes, he does believe human brain development may be affected by the Earth?s magnetic field, especially during growth in the womb. In his book, The Scientific Proof of Astrology, he suggests that the Earth's magnetic field is affected by interactions with those of the sun and the moon. Other planets such as Jupiter, Mars and Venus also play a part because their magnetic fields affect solar magnetism. Seymour said: "It means the whole solar system is playing a symphony on the Earth's magnetic field. We are all genetically tuned to receive a different set of melodies from this symphony." His claims will infuriate other astronomers. They have suffered the humiliation of seeing astrology rising in popularity with top astrologers' earnings surging beyond those of even the most eminent of researchers. Until now they have at least had the comfort of being able to dismiss any suggestion of scientific support for the idea that people?s lives and personalities are influenced by the planets. Among the most outspoken figures against astrology are Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, and Professor Stephen Hawking. Rees has described astrology as "absurd", adding: "There is no place for astrology in our scientific view of the world; moreover its predictive claims cannot stand any critical scrutiny." Seth Shostak, a leading American astronomer, was also scathing, describing Seymour's theory as "nonsensical". He pointed out that even though large planets like Jupiter had magnetic and gravitational fields far greater than the Earth?s, they were massively diluted by distance. "Jupiter's magnetic field is about a trillion times weaker than the Earth's," he said. "You would experience a far stronger field from your lights and washing machine." Shostak works for the Seti Institute in California which is building a powerful radio telescope to seek alien life. "By 2025 we will have surveyed a million stars and I believe we will have found intelligent aliens," he added. Hawking, Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, has said that astrology became impossible as soon as early scientists found that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, an idea on which astrology was founded. However, Seymour's theories won qualified support from an unexpected source. Richard Dawkins, professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford University, who once suggested that astrologers be prosecuted under the trades descriptions act, said that although he had not read the book Seymour's ideas sounded interesting. Astrologers were delighted by Seymour's claims. Russell Grant, the astrologer, said: "At last someone is not just saying: "It's a load of poppycock". If the moon is connected with the ebb and flow of the tides, and humans are 70% water, then why can't the moon be affecting us? So we have good moods or bad moods depending upon the position of the moon?" Others seem to agree although few will discuss it openly. Several years ago it emerged that the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development was using astrology to help manage its 5 billion investment portfolio--programming computers with crucial dates such as lunar eclipses and planetary conjunctions. This year's Sunday Times Rich List included an analysis of the star signs of Britain's 1,000 richest people--finding significant differences with 110 born under Gemini but only 73 under Pisces. Among the powerful who have admitted consulting astrologers to make decisions are Ronald and Nancy Reagan, who allowed the astrologer Joan Quigley to dictate the presidential agenda, including the take-off times for Air Force One. Reagan's chief of staff reportedly had a colour-coded calendar around which he was expected to organise the President's schedule: green for ?good? days and red for "bad". Even Margaret Thatcher once told MPs: "I was born under the sign of Libra, it follows that I am well-balanced."
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