The stars, baby, the stars

The Sunday Age magazine, Sunday Life, has a column called "For better, for worse" in which couples talk about how they met and their relationship. In last sundays we had Veronica and Rod. Veronica , a long-haul flight attendant, said the following; "I met Rod at a jazz festival and we laughed the whole time. He asked me out the next day but I went to a psychic instead, who told me he would become a special person in my life."

I think she has been spending too long in the air and her brain has been bombarded with too many cosmic rays. Firstly, she goes to some stranger whose advice she will listen to even thought he/she is peddling snake oil. Secondly, I wonder what excuse she gave Rod as to why she didn't go out with him the next day. If she said "I'm off to see a psychic", my advice (and I won't charge for this) is run, boy, run. I'm saying this from experience. If, however, she gave some lame ass excuse, then lying is a great way to start off the relationship.

Let's just get this straight; psychics, tarot cards, astrology, etc. are all a crock of shit. Wake up people, its the 21st century!!! They all use the same device, "cold reading". Here's a test. Get someone to cut out a days horoscope so that you dont know which star sign it is. Get them to mix it up and give it to someone else. Then this person will give it to a group of people and ask them to match the reading which most resembles them with their star sign. (This is called a 'double blind test'.) Result, matching is no better than chance. "But", I hear you cry, "that horoscope isn't a 'proper one'. We need to know the time and date of your birthday". Here's a few questions for you:
Which time zone?
What defines your time of birth? First appearance of the head, the time the last part of your body leaves?
What about caesarian births?
How accurate should the time be; hours, seconds, milliseconds, atomic clock resolution?
What is the mechanism that is at play here? Gravity? Do you know what gravity is? Do you realise that the building you are in exerts more force on you due to gravity than Alpha Centauri, the nearest star. Do the math.
Do you realise horoscope star charts are out of date and the constellations no longer rise and set on those dates?

I'll leave you with this quote by British philosopher A. J. Ayer (the word 'religious' can be interchanged with 'psychic').
"The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge ... Unless he can formulate his 'knowledge' in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure that he is deceiving himself."