Horoscopy or the road to moronic marriages and crappy catastrophies part IV

This piece of the discussion is about how people apply astrology
Astrology is applied to a few if not all important decisions in the life of human beings.
Astrology is used to :
A. predict the future ( but we can consider that prediction with astrology has yet to make sense to anyone except astrologers )
See predicting the future is no fun.. because whats the worst that could happen ? you get syphilis.. or your family suffers its own little economic crisis.. or your son is a schizophrenic or you get a psychosomatic disorder or you get castrated by a gang of delinquents ( death is not mentioned here because it is inevitable, you don't astrology to predict it ). All of this does not depend on the stars... it most probably depends on you ( I mean if you really piss off a gang of delinquents in all probability they will castrate you ) (except the schizophrenic son but still that's genetics so it still might be you).
B. Arrange a marriage or Moronic marraiges.. NOW we're talking...
Checking your 'compatibility' with someone.. now that's a real challenge. For example I have known my parents my entire life but cannot predict with 100% accuracy what they would do in any given situation.
Let us see whether a horoscope can do better :
now .. here is how it goes. I am born under a certain 'sign' or 'constellation' ( read 'random connect the dots in the sky') . So I am born under a certain 'sign' and the person I am checking compatibility with is also born under a certain 'sign'.
So now the rule is... each sign is most compatible with some other sign and probably a little less compatible with the ones that are neighbors of that sign ( the zodiac is in the same order AND circular.. so each sign always has 2 neighbors ). Now why is this ? one would ask... why is this sign compatible with only a few signs. or let us ask it the other way around would probably make it easier. why does sign really not like the other signs ?
there is only answer... "Who knows" comes to mind.
There are 'water' signs or 'fire' signs. This is based on who the planet ruling the sign is ( who ever heard of a puny planet owning a group of MASSIVE stars ? you have to be kidding me ...). Well.. just like water signs there are also traffic signs, little electrons jiggling along in wires rule them.. similar scale of magnitude I think but more effective..
In the paper I referred to in the last post, they talk about a person named Carlson. Who did an experiment. He took 2000 couples. 758 divorced and the others not divorced. He had their horscopoes made and asked a bunch of astrologers to find you which ones are the divorced ones and which ones are not. In all practicality the couples that were LEAST compatible should be significantly higher in the divorced group. Exciting premise.. unfortunately it did not happen that way so statistics does not come to the rescue of the astrologer. They still get left out in the cold wasteland of ' not statistically significant'
In the Indian system there is something a little more intruiging. They try and match the 'guna' ( pronounce Goo Naa ) it can translate to prpoerties/characteristcs or points, but I think points is correct here as it is a qunatitaive trait. So they claim that when checking for compatibility they are checking to see how many points between 2 people match. The higher the points the higher the score.. so in essence the higher the compatibility. But there is one major problem... you are calculating a score between two patterns ( albeit it is based on arbitrary symbols and heavenly bodies with no differential effect on me and the other person ).
So What is the null hypothesis ? How should we determine the cutoff ? what score is ok ? the score always goes from 1 to 36. What is the base matrix based on which you decide at least 18 should match ? It is like doing BLAST without the E value !! (If you ever try this with BLAST ..people will probably fling banana peels at you thinking you should be in the zoo.)( for non scientists.. I cannot think of a good parallel right now. sorry guys ). I mean no disrespect but I believe I am entitled to know why all this is the case. I am not satisfied with the answer of " It is so" I mean I can equally well say it is NOT so and no one is the winner. Did the astrologers take random horoscopes and match them and see what score you generally get if ANY two horoscopes are matched ? I think it would follow a normal gaussian distribution since this is random. It has to be... I confess here that I don't have much of a clue as to how these points are calculated but I am sure it is based on when I am born so my 'sign'. There must be a uniform distribution in a tropical country of people being born all around the year. so then the background score would a be gaussian distribution with the mode being the cutoff. If they have not done this.. it just leads to one question.. why the hell not ? did you just accept this at face value ? There are astrology academies in pune... Don't they ever think.. " man this 18.. its not right.. if the cutoff is 15 .. more people will be compatible.. and probably be happier in the belief that " hey.. i am compatible with more people !!"
Now here is the twist... match horoscopes without regard to gender. IF this means anything.. any man's horoscope should match any woman's horoscope better than any other man's horoscope. I mean I am not against anyone being gay but I am sure horoscopes were made for marriages probably mostly for men and women togther.
But I have never come across any person who is even willing to test this theory. Forget an astrologer.. even if is say this to orthodentists they will probably think I am out of my mind..
why is this ? I mean come on.. it is a piece of paper. not self consistent.. highly subject to interpretation by the observer.. why respect it so much ? why fear it so much ? I know someone who actually told me proudly " When my daughter brought the guy she wants to marry home, even though he had not faults I told her... " If your horoscopes are compatible I am in this marriage and otherwise I am not" " come on man !!! who tells their daughter this ? If someone had told me this I would have shown them my middle finger on both hands ( and probably the fingers of both feet too ).
I am convinced now... that there are 3 kinds of marriages. Arranged marriages, love marriages and moronic marriages. The one that does horoscope copmatibility and uses it as the most important criteria is the last kind. My cousin brothers got married on the basis where the first premise was horoscopy. Don't get me wrong, All my sister's in law are wonderful people and all of them are extremely happy, but they would still be wonderful people and be extremely happy even if they had horoscopes predicting that they were gender confused ducks...
There is so much more to write on this but I better stop before I really hurt someone... So part 4 on moronic marriages ends here.
Part 5.. the one I am looking forward to write the most is about catastrophy prediction.. in particular the one in 2012.... Let us see if astrology helps us there...

Horoscopy or the road to moronic marriages and crappy catastrophies part III

Yes... The one probable saving grace of astrology or horoscopy.. statistics...
I have tried to argue that the constellations in the sky are absolutely arbitrary since they are just some dots connected by lines to for some shapes.. SO there is no earhtly ( or heavenly )reason in sight ( to me ) why someone born under some shape should be different than someone born under another. ( here under does not signify physical location, the entire earth is UNDER all the shapes ALL the time so that hardly gives a point of discrimination but instead under is when the sun or the moon is in the foreground of that constellation( or shape but hey.. take it as you want. I am not overtly artistic anyway but thats just me.. :D ) ) So now what is left ? A common sense argument using some facts of astronomy and some simple logic has lead us to the point of asking the question does astrology really make sense ? As Swati has very astutely pointed out on the part 1 post.. it is at best a correlation with events on earth in our puny little lives to some events of alignment of the sun and the moon and the other dudes ( and ladies ) up there ( dudes ( and ladies ) means planets and such.. I am NOT talking of gods here ). So we come to the only way we can assess any patterns or correlations in data. Statistics, pattern recognition algorithms, data mining even metadata analysis... all of these avenues are available to us. unfortunately I can understand only a little bit of the first one, statistics.. so let us start with that.
A huge thanks to my dear friend sameet who pointed out ( read his comment on part 2 ) that a statisical test for astrology had already been done and whats more it was published in a the jounral current science A statistical test of Astrology the current science article and by no less a person than Dr. J.V.Naralikar !!!
(I know his talks are boring but he is among the best scientists there is.. ). I am not going to describe the article here since it is open access. please follow the link above to read it. But the gist of the article is that astrology failed to hold up to the statistical tests they put it to. Therefore cannot be dubbed a science. A hobby at best perhaps. The paper shows that astrological predictions do not show a statistically significant predictive power and are more close to the flipping of a coin. What Dr.Naralikar has done is elegantly simple and lucid and convincing. ... but I too have some statistical experiments that I would like to conduct with astrological data ( obviously not as amazing as these people but nevertheless "majha kharicha vata" (marathi proverb, please ignore if marathi not first language) ) let us take one premise at a time and try to see whether it might be an objective disprovable/provable thesis. ( god I am writing the word thesis here.. I need to get out.. I need to get out of this place now !! )
To be an objective science you need :
1. A provable/disprovable hypothesis ( see.. thesis again .. save me !! )
2. A repeatable observation given a set of assumptions
3. A set of assumptions/rules based on known information that could be subject to change if in need of correction

now let us take the first tenet of astrology :
1. When you are born and Where you are born makes a difference in how you will lead your life.. ( again where is important only to calculate the position of the sun and all the other dudes ( and ladies ) up there. astrologers are not particularly fond of any place on earth.. at least that is the hope ). So do one simple test. define the smallest unit of time and the smallest unit of distance you want and then consider all the people born at those coordinates in time and space. ( In India sample size obviously is no problem in such matters.. ). They should have identical heavenly vistas in the sky when they were born. so they should IDENTICAL lives ( or identical predicted lives ). See if this is statistically significant with respect to important things like.. well education, death, health, spouse.
2. Identical twins.. ohh.. now it is interesting... Identical twins should have everything same !! even if they are born 10, 20, 30 minutes apart ( some simple astronomical calculation would tell us that the moon shifts from from nakshatra( in the Indian system there are 27 constellations other than 12 zodiac signs) to the next in about 12 minutes ( 12 zodiac signs so 2 hrs per zodiac sign and 27 constellations so 2.25 constellations per zodiac sign ( any astrology book would tell you this ), so 0.22 hours per constellation ( thats like 12 minutes )) this can be taken down to any resolution, I just used the moon because it was easy ( and the moon is the fastest moving heavenly body in the sky so for anything else it has to be more than 12 minutes.. point rests ). So depending on how apart twins are born, their horoscopes whould vary accordingly.
3. but again hang on.. we have enough knowledge of biology to understand that 'life' or the newborn baby begins at conception and NOT at birth as is popularly believed. So maybe horoscopes should be cast using conception time and birth time and then see which one is correct. ( if horoscopes with conception time turn out to be more correct.. people will laugh their pants off at astrologers who were doing the wrong thing for millennia !! :D ). So then.. in this case identical twins have a xeroxed fortune of eath other.
4. Why couldn't animals have horoscopes ?. Take 100 mice born at a time as close as you is practically possible. predict their lifespan using the horoscopes ( we like to use lab animals anyway ). Then if you are feeling particularly nasty about all this.. just kill them in the next 5 min when the horoscope says that they would live out their natural lives (and you can laugh like the demons from old south indian movies ). But to play nicely just see whether it works out or not.
These are a few things I would like to do.. any and all suggestions are welcome for more experiments in the comments section. But unfortunately astrologers think I am mocking them. I say to them please open your minds.. if astrology fares well in these tests.. then it IS a science and we will bow our heads in respect to it and accept it. I know astrology was a great discipline in the ancient days. I have even seen with my own eyes some guy reading my mom's future in an authenticated 3000 year old book and I am still at a loss as to explain how the hell did that 3000 old book have a correct picture of my mom's life. But the astrology that is done in these times is either extremely incompetent ( they might not get the math right ) or just plain idiotic ( they could not do much else in life so they became astrologers ).. People have a problem with the identical twin idea. they come up with concepts like "their karma maybe different so different patrika( read horoscope ) " well.. people karma cannot be measured.. so sorry.. i will not believe you. I think astrology can be made better if we apply statistics to it.
But here ends part 3... part 4 will consist of the applications of astrology and I think some suggestions people ( astrologically inclined or not ) should take seriously about it. Part 4 is about moronic marriages based on pieces of paper...

Horscopy or the road to moronic marriages and crappy catastrophies Part II

Well.. in the last post I waxed eloquent on how the two forces of physcis gravity and electromagnetism would affect each individual on earth in precisely the same manner. I did not explicitly mention it but when I am saying the effects are uniform I meant uniform with respect to anywhere on earth. So this takes care of the latitude and longitude part ( hence the comment on distribution of heavenly bodies around the earth ). Also when I say that the effects are repeatable since the heavenly bodies follow precise orbits then I mean that uniform with respect to time of birth.So that takes care of how stars/planets affect us uniformly in both space and time.
Now we look at the next level of organisation of the heavenly bodies in astrology or horoscopy...
"Constellations"
Unfortunately there are many different schools of astrology and the only thing most of them agree with is the number planets in the sky that should affect us. The indian, chinese systems say there are 5 planets and the sun and the moon. The indian system also has two hypothetical heavenly bodies Ketu and Rahu that denote the points of intersection of the paths of the Sun and the Moon as they move on the celestial sphere.(Wikipedia navagraha) Now interestingly these are the points where eclipses will be caused since at these locations both the heavenly bodies would align as seen from earth. Indians were amazing astronomers, so were the chinese, so were the mayans and the egyptians. And they all found one thing in common. All the planets and the moon and the sun travel the heavens in exactly the same path every year. Now considering they had no knowledge of the solar plane ( almost all the planets in the solar system orbit the sun in a single plane except I think Uranus ) it was a very accurate and consistent observation. And this obviously must have helped in navigation since the directions of the passage of the sun and the moon are same. This helps tell the time of the year and therefore the weather ( in the days without pollution the weather would have been pretty consistent over the years ). So to remember the location of the sun and the moon in the sky people decided to use the only available reference. The stars in the background of the path of the sun and moon. Enter the zodiac... logical choice.. anyone of us would have done the same thing. But...
People decided to remember different shapes when they decided to trace the heavens. Well.. ancestors had a good imagination probably but for the life of me I CANNOT see any animals or serpents of hunters or maidens in the sky. for example.. (the constellation gemini to me looks like a capital 'V'). I am saying this just to point out that they ( our ancestors ) were just playing connect the dots in the sky. I will see a lion.. someone else sees a mongoose.. what does it matter ? It does not as long as we both remember 'a' shape and decide that it is the same time of year when the sun is in that shape. So basically a guide to remember the seasons became engrained in the minds of people. this is all fine and perfectly explainable but why oh why would it matter where the sun and the moon are in this particular track of the sky when anyone is born ? Why in whole wide universe would a game of 'random connect the dots in the sky' influence how my life is going to be if I am born when the sun is either superimposed over one shape or another ? . The only way stars/planets can affect us within the kknowledge that we currently have is through gravity and EM and that is independent of where we are on this earth and where they are in the sky. And basically the effect of all these heavenly bodies on earth will be more pronounced than their effect on us with a tiny mass standing on earth. Constellations are the same across cultures becuase.. face it people... the solar plane. the sun will travel the same path along with the planets because they are in the same plane and there will be NO change in its effect on earth ( except for seasons changing and tides )... and by consequence in the destinies of the people on the earth.
So does astrology really work ? Begs the question doesn't it ?

so now we turn to the only thing that would probably make believers out of disbelieving cynics like me, the saving grace of astrology .. statistics.. if only there are statistical patterns in astrology .. maybe.. maybe there is some sense in astrology.. that would be discussed in part 3.

horoscopy or the road to moronic marraiges and crappy catastrophies... Part I

well.... to begin with let me quote sheldon cooper from the "Big Bang Theory" " knowing that you are a sagitarius tells us that you are part of the mass cultural delusion that arbitrarily defined constellations affect your everyday life". The person who wrote this was brilliant !!!!! Author's Note :I don't mean disrespect for astronomy nor do I want to disrespect the faith people have in astrology or horoscopy. They are at perfect liberty to believe what they want and act accordingly, after all.. who am I to tell them ?
Now that the political correctness is out of the way, let us get down to the fun part. Horoscopy or Astrology. Just what is this wonderful prediction tool that enables us to read our 'past' and our 'future' in the stars in the heavens ? Let us try to understand what influence the planets and stars can have on humans. If you are a rational and practical person you will say well.. there's gravity.. and probably light so electromagnetism. Fair enough... but then hang on... stars are HUGE !! and so are most planets compared to earth. And obviously compared to me the earth is HUGE. so does the gravity of a planet millions of miles away in space make a big difference to me if I in a different place on the earth ? Gravity is the weakest force in existence. yes it has very long range effects but then, the effects also decrease with the square of the distance !! now if a star is 5000000 km away and a star is 1000000km away from me then the effect of each one is divided by the squares of the respective distances. I mean will the effect change if I am pune or if I am in new zealand. Occam's razor and common sense and simple physics tells us... probably not. And as for light or electromagnetism, well.. the stars do shine at night so I can see them ( they probably must be shining by day too but the sun blots them out ) but the fun part is, I can only see the stars on my side of the earth and not on the opposite side, sure I'll see them in 12 hours time but still. So light from stars on the other side of the earth is not reaching me. Maybe neutrinos will, but let's face it, we are not in the middle of a solar furnace here so one neutrino hitting someone in my family in about 6 or 7 generations of seems right ( I have not calculated this, but this is an educated guess, ignore if you feel not important ). So gravity will have a uniform effect on me ( unless one proves that the distrubution of heavenly bodies around earth is skewed enough to cause a non uniform gravity field, of course this is on the background of the earth's and sun's and moon's gravity fields. But I know of no such data ( of course I am ignorant as they come ) so let us agree that gravity is more or less uniform on the earth ) uniform effect on me and everyone else on the planet, from bacteria to elephants ( their local masses are different but the effect is so negligible since gravity is the weakest force in existence ). Next is light, well light never hurt anybody really. we are alive here because of the sun's light, so more light from the stars can't be all that bad. We have an ozone layer to knock out all the UV rays. Thankfully we are not bathed in gamma rays like some other planets of some other stars. So light is a good thing, and again.. affects all the earth in the same way. Ok if you are mole or a worm underground it won't matter much but it can be argued that light has been uniform on the earth for years and will be uniform for years to come. No change in the way light affects depending on where you were born ( unless you count the hole in the ozone layer but hey that has nothing to do with the stars right ? ). SO now that we have established that all the effects possible by stars and planets on us are uniform, repeatable (since the planets and stars move in precise orbits with respect to the earth ) and basically no force in the known laws of physics can explain why they affect different people differently ( if at all they do ) we turn to next level of horscopy.. that is constellations. that is for part 2...

iPOD statistics...

About a month ago, I finally decided to buy an iPOD. Actually I just decided to buy anything that plays music and is small but liked the 'iPOD' so bought one. The first thing that hit me when making the choice was the total amount of music I own ( in any format and obtained by any means ) is less than half the memory of the lowest model of the series. So being the practical koknastha bought a 1GB iPOD shuffle. YaY glorious day !! now i have a player and so to the next complicated step of the project : filling it with music. Having almost never used windows ( thats for wimps anyway ) was fiddling around the net trying to figure out what to do.. so found salvation in gtk-pod an amazing gtk widget to synchronise with the apple pods ( 'i' or no 'i' ). It turns out that while using gtk pod is fun and you get a sense of accomplishment of putting one over the microsoft guys, there are a lot of things that one misses in gtk-pod. I realised that there is something called play count for every track one puts in. I was thinking whoever has done this is barmy.. why the hell would I want to know how many times I played a track ?. Then I discovered what iTUNES is all about. Though unfortunately this is available only for windows and MAC os ( damn those guys are after my money ), I was shocked out my headphones when I saw the online music store where one can buy tracks, single tracks!!!. But the most amazing thing is : iTUNES has 3 parameters to every track. play count, skip count ( the most interesting one I think among all the three ), and track rating ( ranges from 1 - 5 stars ) for grading all the music that one puts in. I guess these are parameters for the shuffle feature to learn what you like. BUT, it opens a huge universe of data for the music industry... here is what you get :
1. because They always ask you to 'register' the iPOD ( every time you run the program in fact )
so they know who has bought the iPOD and where they live
2. If there is a music store, there's gotta be a database of some sort of pod users, so then it is not a long leap to saving the 'names' of tracks used by these people sorted according to other data ( occupation age and so on )
the fun starts here :
each track can potentially be saved by the database with the parameters of how many times you played the track in a fixed time duration, how many times you skipped a track in that time duration, what you rate the track as.
So it is pretty simple that the track you played the most, or the one that you rate the most is the one you like the most, but what is even more interesting is the that track you kept on your iPOD but skipped playing the most. See you put if there because you like it, you did not delete it but kept skipping it. For example the pod comes with a shuffle mode so you could be doing it out of mere annoyance of getting the track at the wrong time to interfere with your mood.
so the most interesting thing to study would be how many people skip a particular track but don't delete it and how do they rate the track as. it means they want to listen to it, but not just now. maybe they associate it with something specific, or it reminds them of something specific, something that you don't listen to in traffic but listen to but like to pay attention to while listening.
Couple the skipping data with rating and how many times the track is played and you start getting all sorts of fun patterns.. there is one track on my iPOD that I have rated as 5 stars, but I don't listen to it all the time. in fact I SKIP it and listen to it only when I am in that mood.
compiling data using most listened to tracks is all fine, but compiling data with skipped but listened to tracks would be more interesting.
I mean I skip tracks that I don't want to listen to now, but I still keep them on the pod. Now i don't own much music and mostly listen to what I really like, maybe people have millions of tracks that they listen to on a single pod and therefore skip just because they don't like it.
But if iPOD statistics could be done I guess a pattern would emerge of some kind of tracks being special due to skipping. I have decided to compile some statistics of the songs that I listen to a lot and skip a lot, maybe I could discern a pattern over time. If anyone wants to help in this endeavour please send me YOUR iPOD statistics. you could ask for my contact id in the comments here.
Now this is amazing and a FREE demographic tool about any damn kind of music on the planet. Why have ratings and so on ? just use your iPOD user pool to figure out what the people like. Wonder if they use it in the iTUNES store to push songs onto people.. :D

Un'faith'ful...

years ago I married 'reason', the perfect wife
beautiful and lucid, my partner for life

reason showed me a life as pure as gold
sparkling and pure, divinely so
yet reason is brutal and ruthless and cold
and she never loved me so I had to go

on a journey to find myself, destroyed by knowledge
I was mere substance, a ghost, a wraith
then I saw someone I never did acknowledge
the one that always waited,the wonderful 'faith'

faith smiled at me and all of my flaws
faith never demanded or made any laws
reason had conditions, faith had only one
that I trust in something and there's no need to run

now faith is my mistress, my place of refuge,
my shield from distress and from reason's subterfuge
reason is honest , yes the perfect wife
and she had promised me the answers to life

but reason's answers are cold and sterile
and faith touched my soul, made my passion fertile
reason always dictates the way I should live
yet faith never tells me what I should believe

I love reason for life don't get me wrong
yet faith also has wonderful presence
reason departs at the end of the song
but faith remains one with my essence

So,
reason will analyse me to see if I was truthful
but faith will still love me even if I am un'faith'ful

I remember...

A twinkle in your eye, your secret smile just for me
The exhilaration I feel, a moment of bliss
My heart was dancing, but I wished to dance with you
My skin on fire, the moment of our stolen first kiss

I remember all that I said, on MY shoulder you had cried
I could not understand, but it does not mean I have not tried

I gave you everything I had, but it was probably not enough
Leaving you was the hardest thing, please know I am not so tough

I see the anger and the hatred in you
but can't you see I hate it too ?

I never thought you'd lie to me
I never thought you'd make me see

how easy it is to be a slave to myself
how long would it take till I forgave myself

was that all a dream never to be real ?
was I lying, when I told you how I feel ?

These questions haunted me, ate me alive
I lost myself, drove myself away to survive

you buried your hurt under a mask of a smile
or maybe you found love in the arms of another
I though was left to rot
and the guilt is all that I care to remember
I remember...