I can handle the truth.
I suspect many can, but just don’t care to learn how much bunk they subscribe to everyday.
Astronomy is the empirical study of objects and phenomena beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. Astrology is horseshit. Excuse me, I should clarify, Astrology is what the US National Science Board, in a written statement, declared as a ‘pseudoscience’.
There was a time back in the day (and here I mean 3500 years ago in ancient Babylonia where people were yet to figure that separating your feces from your food was sound advice) when folks looked up at the stars and, not knowing what they were, how they worked, where they were, how they came to be, or whether they even moved, declared triumphantly that the Sunrise relative to them had profound and specific influences over one’s fate and that this could be discovered through divination. Wow. (People who bullshit the King like that look you straight in the eye. They don’t stutter, they don’t flinch. Their yam-sacks look like two oversized clenched fists.) And when their divinations didn’t add up, they just cooked the books so they seemed like they did, retroactively.
The vague and universally applicable nature of such divination proved quite successful. So successful in fact that every one of you reading this knows what your sign is. Or at least what it would have been had you lived thousands of years ago. The Earth wobbles and perceived alignments with stars change over time. Astrologers have known this, and just as it is now, the Ophiuchus scandal has been ignored before. After all, introducing science into the equation was what separated Astronomy from Astrology in the first place. In the 17th century. The Age of Reason.
It might come to you as odd that we here at Sci-ənce! would even waste time with such obviously exploded ideas, I mean does anyone even take Astrology seriously anymore? As a matter of fact they do.
This isn’t the first time Rockstar Professor Brian Cox (of Large Hadron Collider fame) has gotten into hot water because of the Astrology community. In a previous documentary “Wonders of the Solar System” he was hounded and asked to apologize for referring to Astrology as ‘rubbish’. (min 8:15) When asked for a statement by the BBC Brian Cox replied “I apologize to the Astrology community for not making myself clear. I should have said that this new age drivel is undermining the very fabric of our civilization”.
If Brian Cox is not doing it for you how about hearing it from
Maybe some James Randi and Hugh Laurie
or another Randi.
Or perhaps you’re more of a Bill Nye kinda guy.
It’s just too easy to find this sort of stuff. So easy that it boggles my mind that people still, in 2011, regularly ask me my sign or tell me theirs. Perhaps if talking about astrology were anything other than verbal diarrhea I would allow my ear to be bent.
Now, I’m a student of the human condition, I understand that it can just be an icebreaker, something to talk about with someone you don’t know or have just met. I get it. But so is Pokemon. Theres a lot of those, maybe you can try to figure out which one you are. Go ahead, try that on a hot-skirt next time you’re in a bar, I bet she’s a WigglyTuff.
The short and simple of it is that Astrology boils down to the Forer Effect and Confirmation bias. Claims about reality are either true or they are not. I’m interested in the truth. I can handle it. Can you?
This post was brought to you by Cobalt (Co). Fact: Cobalt is named for the mythical Kobold, a devious imp in Germanic folklore that lives in mines. This was because cobalt looks similar to other metals such as iron, but when smelted releases potentially deadly arsenic fumes. The miners of old blamed this on the creatures, who maliciously put the ore there to trick them.