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Sunday, January 16, 2011

The Changing Horoscopes!

By now you've surely heard of the news going around: Thanks to the eternal and steady drift of the starts, horoscopes once fixed 2000 years ago no longer hold. The start and end dates have shifted - so if you were Leo earlier, possibly you are Virgo now. Or something.

Logically, the question arises - do you look up your horoscope based on when you were born or which sign you fall under in the current setting? But setting that aside, let's turn to something else.

I recently got hold of a copy of "The Demon Haunted World" by Carl Sagan. A paragraph from it reads:

A scientist places an ad in a Paris newspaper offering a free horoscope. He receives about 150 replies, each as requested, detailing a place and time of birth. Every respondent is then sent the identical horoscope, along with a questionnaire asking how accurate the horoscope had been. 94% of the respondents (and 90% if their families and friends) reply that they were at least recognizable in the horoscope. However, the horoscope was drawn up for a French serial killer. If an astrologer can get this far without even meeting his subjects, think how well someone sensitive to human nuances and not overly scrupulous might do.

... just sayin' you know... That's all.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

haha, interesting.