Horoscopes and astrology

I occasionally read my horoscope in the paper and sometime even I believe. Last week was suppose to be a crap week, (I have never seen numbers soooo low) and it was. Even more promising is that once I stopped reading it things got better, and today when I was considering reading it my paper was stolen. That is fate
Astrology is a game of numbers I am Aquarius along with ~500,000,000 other people (if you like the Chinese version over the Greeks I am a Dragon), so by chance alone some of those people are bound to have enough vaguely worded things happen to them that they see it as prophecy. Also, like the psychic guy who talks to the dead John N something, most people over look the mistakes and only see the accuracies, they fool themselves. Now before I dismiss Astrology out of hand the signs are a very nice way to classify people. However, if you read the characteristics assigned to your sign you would have to work to not match them, plus they can be modified to “fit” better since I am Aquarius Pieces rising, plus I have a weird moon effect, and Jupiter had taken the day off so Venus and Saturn snuck out… So I fit my profile perfectly! Ok seriously, there is a chance that planets and stars conspire with chaos theory to alter the day to day lives of people, (especially if you believe they do), but it is unlikely to alter your fortune

Astrology was once a science, that is why it ends in -logy which roughly means the study of. However, the problem is the Greeks and the Romans did all the calculations between 2 and 3 thousand years ago, and since orbital theory is still fairly new today. So what they did was very inaccurate long term, so a couple of thousand years of orbital drift hasn’t been accounted for at least in the books I have seen. This means that when Mars is supposed to be doing something he might not be, since he isn’t at “home”. The Astrology people really need to start hanging out with the Astronomy and math people, since if they want to achieve the level of a science they need to put some science back in. (Unless you consider psychology as defined by P.T. Barnum a science, in which case Astrology is still very much a science.)

Why then do I read my horoscope? Because you just never know, it is a faith based system, so it can never be disproven. (Like the Kansas School Board, does it really exist? I can’t prove it does, so I have to accept them.) (Ok, a pseudo-pun on quantum mechanics is a bit much but since they won’t get it I am leaving it in!) My theory is that it doesn’t hurt to believe in things that can’t be proven, especially since not believing and being wrong has serious consequences.