Horoscopes

I recall years ago, when I was back in high school, talking to some friends about astrology and the daily horoscope.

There was a new service where you could ring and get a full astrological report based on your date of birth. This caused some excitement among a few who believed that astrology was useful. My view that astrology was fake was met with derision.

When I mentioned how broad and inaccurate the newspaper horoscopes were, they replied that they had to be broad as they were trying to provide something that would apply to a wide range of people that cover an entire month. In those circumstances, there were bound to be some people who had slightly different experiences to what was printed.

Another friend who was sceptical as well suggested that we test this new astrology service. There were several suggestions including asking for reports of different dates of birth and seeing if any was duplicated. The believers thought that this might work.

In the end we decided to ask for reports weeks apart using the one date of birth. That was all that was required as the two reports, based on the identical date of birth, were totally different. You may expect some differences as the timing was 2-3 weeks apart, but the longer-term predictions were not even close to each other in many cases.

So what happened to the views of the true believers? They still believe that your future can be read in the stars, but the service we tried was not very good. We just need to find a more reliable and accurate service.

You can search all you like, but you will not find the answer to your future revealed by the random placement of distant stars.

When I get the time to get the research together, I will provide details of when each constellation appears in the sky and compare that with the time of year that is supposed to correspond with the constellation. Over time they have changed so that a Pisces is not necessarily the dominant constellation during March.