Comments on: Popular Delusions I: Astrology

By: lpetrich

lpetrich — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 22:30:42 +0000

As to birth vs. some other point in development; there are numerous such landmarks in development. Conception, hollow ball (blastocyst), embryo disk (embryoblast), implantation, infolding to make gut (gastrulation), infolding to make spinal cord (neurulation), emergence of brain, brain waves, and after birth the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror (18 - 24 months) and the gradual acquisition of language.

As to astrologers not knowing where the Sun is relative to the stars, that's because they have not bothered to correct for precession. The "signs" of the Zodiac are located at where their corresponding constellations were about 1850 years ago, when Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy wrote his classic treatise on astrology, the Tetrabiblos ("Four Books").

Now if astrology was an even halfway rigorous science, astrologers ought to be able to notice the effects of precession on their predictions; they ought to be able to discover a mismatch that can be fixed by moving the vernal equinox appropriately relative to the Zodiac constellations.

Similar sorts of mismatches were how Neptune and Sirius B were discovered; they were "seen" by their gravitational effects on Uranus and Sirius A well before they were directly observed.

By: StaceyJW

StaceyJW — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 15:32:15 +0000

My favorite comment on Astrology when people defend it's "truth"-

If it were true that planets influence your personality, and stars chart your fate, wouldn't the time of conception be much more important than your birthdate/time?
Birth date is arbitrary in modern times, with induced labor/ ceseareans, etc. If those "forces" were intristically part of your "creation", wouldn't it be necessary for them to influence you from the earliest part of your growth? A full term baby is already developed, unlike an embryo.
Was actual birthdate used because no one understood conception (and could not know when it happened) when Astrology was created?

Of course, Astrology is not at all LOGICAL- just a bunch of outdated superstition!

By: MD

MD — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 04:58:12 +0000

Astrology can be compared to Graphology except for the fact that astrology is based more on superstition that science. Richard Dawkins wrote an article on astrology in which he compared it to a similarly character-telling "science" - graphology. Graphology can actually be used to identify some character traits where as astrology is based on speculations and superstitions.

By: dhagrow

dhagrow — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 03:21:56 +0000

Stellarium was new to me. Very cool stuff. For those of you interested in similar software:

Celestia - Tries to model as much of the universe as it can, including spacecraft and eclipses. Great for getting a sense of scale. Try the in-program demo in the Help menu.
NASA World Wind - Just the Earth, but with a lot of different data layers, like hurricane animations or global temperatures.
Everyone probably already knows Google Earth.
And while I'm at it, Will Wright's (of SimCity and The Sims fame) upcoming "Life, the Universe, and Everything" simulator: Spore (preview video).

The first 3 are all free and open-source.

By: The Ridger

The Ridger — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:53:20 +0000

Damn. I forgot to attribute my first sentence to Wikipedia...

By: The Ridger

The Ridger — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:52:41 +0000

The term "Occam's razor" first appeared in 1852 in the works of Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865), long after Ockham's death circa 1349.

I would guess that it's used because Rowan thought that was how it was spelled and a lot of his contemporaries picked it up. And that you want to use it because you see it so often. I know I was over 30 before I found out it was Ockham.

By: Ebonmuse

Ebonmuse — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 15:12:12 +0000

Another excellent point. Incidentally, if you ever want to verify which constellation the Sun or any of the planets is in on a given date, I can recommend Stellarium, a free, open-source piece of planetarium software. If you turn on constellation labeling and turn off the atmosphere, it's clear as day (so to speak) that on May 27, the Sun was indeed right in the middle of Taurus.

By: Rastaban

Rastaban — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 12:13:32 +0000

One more problem: astrologers don't even know where the stars are. For example, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's daugher was born May 27, but Susan Miller identifies "her birth constellation" as Gemini. And yet, on May 27 the sun was not in Gemini but in Taurus. The sun won't enter Gemini until around June 21.

Given that astrology is supposed to be about the influence of the stars, you would think that astrologers could at least learn about the precession of the equinoxes and adjust their charts accordingly. (Of course that would presuppose that the actual location of the stars has any astrological importance - which obviously it doesn't.)

By: lpetrich

lpetrich — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 00:58:12 +0000

Actually, it's even worse in some ways. it's the differential gravitational force or tidal force that is will make a difference, because all the objects being pulled the same amount will not affect their relative configuration. This is easy to estimate for an object with size s and distance r from a mass M:

F ~ GM/(r+s)^2 - GM/r^2 ~ GMs/r^3

And using the objects that Ebonmuse used as examples, I find that the star's tidal force is 5*10^(-18) that of the nearby person.

By: Philip Thomas

Philip Thomas — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 19:46:35 +0000

No, I think it was just me being dumb! Rereading your first post its meaning seems perfectly clear now, I guess I should think before posting.