Data from 22,000+ Horoscopes Shows True Nature of Astrology PDF Print E-mail
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Written by Bart Farkas
Monday, 24 January 2011 17:52
There have been a lot of studies on the subject of horoscopes, astrology, and astrological predictions in general and as Wikipedia so succinctly tells us: “Studies have repeatedly failed to demonstrate statistically significant relationships between astrological predictions and operationally defined outcomes.” In short, when put to the scientific test horoscopes succeed as much as chance alone in predicting whatever parameter they are purported to predict.
A chart showing the most common words used in horoscopes on Yahoo.com's horoscope web pages.
Of course, believers in Astrology usually repeat the same old tired explanations for the inability of science to confirm astrological predictions. These include a lack of scientific equipment or theory capable of measuring or understanding the mystery of astrology, and of course simple lack of belief. As former JREF President and Bad Astronomer Phil Plait has pointed out many a time and in great detail: “Astrology is wrong.” Seriously, if you want to know why Astrology and Horoscopes can’t possibly make any sense, read Phil’s take on it here at his Bad Astronomy website (
http://www.badastronomy.com).
The reason I bring this up is that a fine chap named David McCandless recently analyzed 22,168 horoscopes from the Yahoo.com astrology website in an effort to see if there was any correlation between the sorts of words that most commonly appear in horoscopes. After filtering out words like ‘the’, ‘and’ and the like, McCandless discovered that no matter what sign a person may be, and no matter what type of horoscope a person may be reading, the words that appear are pretty much identical with over a 90% match between signs.
They even isolated the most common words and wrote a generic meta-prediction that applies to all of the star signs for every day of the year. Here is what they came up with:
“Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot. Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love. Family and friends matter. The world is life, fun and energy. Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best. Help and talk to others. Change your mind and a better mood comes along…”
Wow, reading that has just changed my life; specifically in that the 30 seconds I spent reading it is time that I can never get back. We need to take our hats off to folks like David who go to the trouble of exposing Astrology for what it really is, and the resulting graphic that his team came up with to show the most common words is actually sort of pleasing to the eyes. Read more about the report here or visit
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/.