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Culture: Game: Pretend
MacDuff's Horoscope   (+2, -1)  [vote for, against]
A horoscope for those delivered by caesarean section.

So various organisations (including NASA) have pointed out that the dates typically used for astrology signs are wrong, because precession or something. And also there should be an extra (13th) one called 'Ophiuchus'.

This news unsurprisingly wasn't well-received by the purveyors of horoscopes, because ... well, who would want to admit that they've been giving everyone someone else's predictions their whole life?
Fortunately, this debacle didn't actually matter, because it turns out horoscopes have very little predictive value.

So what? Well, it occurred to me today that all newspaper astrology readings are specified using the date of the subject's /birth/. Which strictly means that those who avoided this chore through medical intervention /don't have a star-sign/.

I therefore propose that astrologers could keep the existing star-signs in the places their audience expects, and use the additional star-sign for those from their mother's womb untimely ripp'd. The astrological symbol for Ophiuchus seems very appropriate, which I think proves that this is valid, and was indeed fortold.
-- Loris, May 23 2021

It's the main indicator that astrology is crap: the ONE THING that astrologers could do precisely (measure the positions of the stars etc) is the one thing they refuse to do.
Conveniently, I was born under Ophiuchus, so I can have lots of fun whenever horoscope-loving types ask me my sign. A former flatmate of that sort told me that "I ruined her world-view" after a brief discussion of the Zodiac.
-- neutrinos_shadow, May 24 2021


*Real* believers in astrology don't let anything inconvenient like facts or astronomy get in the way of their belief.
-- hippo, May 24 2021


//Loris, May 23 2021//

Your chart reveals untimely actions. Haste may be fateful, yet caution may not bring you the rewards you desire. You will meet a stranger in a yellow boiler suit. Do not believe anything you read online.
-- pocmloc, May 24 2021


This fascinates me. My horoscope is always a day late. If I read one from the day before it makes perfect sense. If I read today's it's always nonsense.

Now I'm wondering. And what if you have your labor induced because you are tired of being large and awkward and terribly uncomfortable and you opt to pop the cork, so to speak, when you want to, not when the baby was meant to be.

There are all kinds of questions. Or you could read the comics and forget the whole astrology thingy and say it's a waste of your time. Comics aren't but the stars are. Hmmm. Wait...
-- blissmiss, May 24 2021


Isn't that like crossword clues? If you look at today's crossword you haven't a clue what is going on. Look at yesterdays and read the answers and it all makes sense (except for the cryptic crossword which doesn't make sense even if you have all the supposed answers)
-- pocmloc, May 24 2021


If god doesn't play dice, it's all deterministic. If electromagnetic fields cook a child, complex gravity fields are there as well. We are in a varying gravity field, right?

Astrology guessing at the data is another matter.
-- wjt, May 26 2021


//If electromagnetic fields cook a child//

Ehhh ... are we speaking from experience here?
-- pertinax, May 26 2021


But they don't cook children
-- pocmloc, May 26 2021


Astrology debunkings often rely on the seeming unconnectedness of the stars' position in the sky, to an individual human being. They are far, far away, after all.

This mode of reasoning neglects the possibility that the stars' position could be directly (but incidentally) correlated to factors that have a more direct bearing on our character and physiology.

In particular, seasonal changes in conditions reoccurring annually in humans' evolution, could influence the temper and physique of people, depending on the season of their birth. These seasonal variations have been observed scientifically (link pending..)

Unfortunately, 'conventional' zodiac astrologers have been studied thoroughly and found to be no better than chance at predicting a person's character. (...)

From all this, my suggestion is that astrology could be a real thing but that our modern astrologers are not very good at it. This opens the possibility to a new wave of scientific astrologers, basing their charts on measurement and study, rather than woo.

As the idea suggests, c-section could disrupt the 'natural' character of a person. Other anthropogenic influences could be drugs, noise, photoperiod, temperature, and humidity.
-- afinehowdoyoudo, May 28 2021


[afinehdyd] I lean toward that opinion myself - and suggest that historically, the most pronounced effects of seasonal variation on the developing psyche (which may well have been a thing) are probably less visible these days due to the invention of central heating. Something which smooths things out over the year such that a day in mid-summer isn't vastly different from one mid-winter - at least compared to the experience of someone living in a home with only rudimentary tools and fire at their disposal.

But regards the idea, it doesn't seem to be of any harm to introduce a "not of woman born" variant into the zodiac - though I think I'd be tempted to add it as a binary variable - so 12 normal birth signs, and then another 12 with the same sign, but with added Caesarian factor. We can defer the introduction of artificial wombs and the astrological mechanics of the spawning fields of the machine-collective from the Matrix/Skynet until it becomes a more pressing issue.
-- zen_tom, May 28 2021


We are cooked from the primordial soup. Cooking in this use is on the subtle side.

True, The science of Planck shows us Astrology will have a very very subtle effect. That is why I thought it might affect the electromagnetic formations of the mind, in one's liquid environment development from the combined blob, to give some generalized types of people. Generalized way s of how people ride the gravity terrain as macro-stuff happens.

Birth time, date, and method is a slight mislabel/ reduction of the data.
-- wjt, May 29 2021


Does this work if we were born preemie? I mean, it wasn't much... but if I'm a Scorpio, then I'm a soft-shelled Scorpio for sure.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, May 29 2021


Mentioning hard shells, I wonder if large nuclear tests have to be factored in?

//Dice are also deterministic// this doesn't sit well with me. A true dice action isn't supposed to be deterministic by definition. an action that goes through a probability focal point that can't vectored from the past actions.
-- wjt, May 29 2021



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