When I'm not confused for a cosmetologist, because my lovely
hair and makeup, I'm usually asked, you know, oh, you're an
astronomer. I'm a Virgo, you know, so what's going to happen
to me? I'm like, I used to be okay, that's an astrologer. I'm
not an astrologer. But now I just I kind of lean into it. I'm
like, ooh, that you're going to get a letter from the IRS next
week and add that lump on your ass.
You mean, you're playing games with them. Yeah, you don't
believe in astrology.
There's no evidence for astrology. In fact, there's
there's, you know, many, many random controlled, you know,
trials, double bond study that showed not only is it, it's
almost counter to the evidence, you know, like, they say that a
monkey can throw a dart at a stock chart, and get, you know,
do better than most hedge fund managers or something like that.
Actually, astrologers are even worse. Like, I don't even know,
a protozoa could throw a dart. Yeah, it's it's almost
anti-correlated, you know, with with what reality is. So no,
there's certainly no validity to that. And I added, you know,
provocative tweet, you know, whatever post recently, and it
was about, there's actually, you know, we believe there are 12
zodiac signs, and that dates back to the Persians and the
Babylonians, and how they divided up them. And it almost
divides, you know, they were fascinated with the number 60.
So that that was the base of their number system. Our number
system is 10, because we have 10 figures. For some reason, they
love base 60. I don't know why. And so they love things that
divided evenly into it. 10 does, but anyway, you know, hashtag
fail for the for the Babylonians, but they divided up
into 1212 zodiac signs. So we still use those. There was a
problem, though, the zodiac that you're do you know what this is?
Do you know what determines your zodiac sign? No. Okay, so it's
determined by the position of the sun. What constellation was
the sun in on the day you were born September 26. So when the
that means that the sun was in the constellation Virgo, or no,
you were a Libra Libra. Okay, so you do know what you are, but
you don't know why you are. So Libra means it's a
constellation, there's 88 constellations that are accepted
by astronomers. And the one of them is Libra and the path that
the sun and the moon and all the planets travel in is called the
zodiac. It's confined to a plane, because the same
protoplanet, proto solar system disk, from which we formed out
of all the planets came out of a nebular cloud, a cloud of gas,
dust, rocks, and so forth that came from a pre existing star
that exploded, creating what's called a supernova. The
supernova provided the materials to make not only the earth, but
the entire solar system, including the sun. That happened
about 5 billion years ago. And 4 billion years ago, the earth
formed out of that cloud, that the spin of that disk, all
things have a spin associated with them like a figure skater,
you know, as she's spinning around on her axis or whatever,
she can have her arms out, brings them in, she spins
faster. That's called conservation of angular
momentum. Spin is a type of angular momentum. The whole disk
is spinning in a plane. It's like this desk, this table that
we're sitting at. If you're listening, imagine a flat table.
It's spinning a circular disk is spinning with a certain
direction. All the objects are moving in that same direction
due to conservation of this term called angular momentum. The sun
moves in that apparently moves in that position. Obviously,
we're rotating around the sun, but it looks like the sun's
coming around us. The moon is Jupiter. So on the day you were
born, there's a constellation behind the sun from our
perspective. That was Libra on September 26. And that was the
day that you were born that determines the fact that you're
a Libra. But there's a problem. In December, where we are now,
the sun is actually in a different constellation, the one
that doesn't exist, according to the zodiac that was created
something like 65,000 years ago, called Ophiuchus. So there's a
certain segment of people born in a 17 day stretch in December,
late November to early December, that are actually Ophiuchans, or
Ophiuchus, or whatever. So that should obliterate astrology as
any semblance of a science because they didn't even know
this constellation existed. And yet something like 12% of all
people share that constellation. So it's just complete nonsense.
There's no validity to it. Twins that are born on the same day
have radically different, you know, histories, past futures.
And there's no predictive power to it. And that's what science
is about, right? We want to make a hypothesis, test it, iterate
on it, and have confirmation of it. And there's zero, in fact,
for astrology. In fact, if you'll permit me a kind of silly
story, when I was dating my wife, who would become my wife
in the beginning, we she, you know, kind of thought it's fun,
maybe we'll go see, you know, you know, someone who can tell
our fortunes if we belong together. So we went to an
astrologer. And the astrologer asked me a bunch of questions,
you know, when were you born, obviously. And, oh, no, she
asked me, what's your sign? So I said, I'm a Gemini. And she
said, Okay, cool. And then she told me a bunch of things. And
at the end, I said, I just want to double check. I was playing
I'm kind of a, you know, a little bit of a jerk sometimes.
So I said, I just want to confirm. Gemini is born in
September. I'm born September 9. So Oh, no, no, that's a Virgo.
But the same things are going to happen to you anyway. Like it
didn't change her outcome. And so in the language of the
science, philosophy of science, Karl Popper, others, it's
unfalsifiable. And you cannot be proven right. So flexible,
you know, you're going to find challenges, the stock market is
going to fluctuate, political turmoil, rain during your
they're so flexible, it can accommodate any story. And
that's a hallmark of non science or sometimes anti scientific
thinking.
