Speaking of comics to mock pseudoscience… today’s Calamities of Nature pretty much nails it. Not much to add here.

Tip o’ the ecliptic to Scott Romanowski.

I have not yet seen "Wonders of the Solar System", because it hasn’t aired in America yet. It’s a BBC astronomy documentary hosted by my friend Brian Cox, and from what I have heard is an extraordinary event. I can’t wait to see it.

Some folks, though, have a different opinion. Brian, like me, is an outspoken skeptic, and will brook no nonsense. In one episode of the show, he said, "…astrology is a load of rubbish."


This is, of course, completely accurate. Astrology has no mechanism, no predictability, and no physical way of working. When tested even using its own standards it fails miserably.

Astrology doesn’t work, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

Just as obviously, those people who are selling something have taken umbrage at Brian’s impolitic uttering of truth. They have started a Facebook page where they can get together and reinforce their silliness, make fun of Brian, and grossly misrepresent science. My favorite bit is this, in the page description:

His careless assertion was unresearched, unsubstantiated and unscientific. Has he done any empirical studies? Has he explored his birth chart? Can he cite any scientific studies disproving astrology that are not fundamentally flawed? Of course not. I have certainly never seen him at an astrology conference or read anything written by him about astrology. Cox is simply not qualified to speak on astrology and his comments amount to no more than prejudice.

Yes. Brian, a PhD physicist with decades of training in the scientific method, research, analysis, logic, and critical thinking, who has written a book on relativity and works at CERN on the Large Hadron Collider, is not qualified to speak on astrology. Heh.

By the way, astrologers: in the link above I do cite scientific studies that are not flawed and show astrology to be nonsense, just as they trash flawed studies that support astrology. I have explored birth charts and found them to be nothing more than tarot cards/Ouija boards/tea leaves/cold reading tools. I have seen empirical studies, and they all show astrology = nonsense.

And "prejudice"? No, it’s not prejudice. You just assume that because we disagree with you. But I’ve studied astrology, and I conclude that it’s garbage. That’s not prejudice. That’s reality.

And don’t forget:

Astrology doesn’t work.

Shocker, I know. I’ve written on this topic extensively, but of course astrologers send me email — seriously — saying how their flavor of magic works, or that I wasn’t fair, or that if only I faced the right way and triantrilated my fibbertygibbet, astrology would be correct, despite my article very carefully showing that no matter how you slice it, astrology doesn’t work.

Obviously, astrology’s horse isn’t quite dead yet, so beating it isn’t such a bad idea. My friend Moriel Schottlender wrote up a nice dissection of astrology walking through the steps showing (despite many astrologers’ claims) that gravity clearly is not the force behind astrology. She even includes math.

Of course, those of us in the reality-based Universe knew this, since when tested properly astrology fails tests devised even by astrologers themselves (see my article linked above). So there is no force behind astrology, except that of the human mind to fool itself. Because of that, we’ll always be debunking bunk like this. I guess that’s one thing astronomers and astrologers really do have in common: there will always be work for us.

Sometimes, news comes pouring in to Bad Astronomy HQ, and I am but a man, so I can’t keep up (writing about Saturn’s moons and giant galactic panoramas and big weird Scandinavian spinny thingies keep me pretty busy, y’know).

So here are some quick bits o’ interest.

1) Dr. Harriet Hall will inject (haha!) some medical sense into Oprah

2) You already knew this, but Rush Limbaugh is somewhat misinformed on basic matters of science and medicine^*.

3) Obama’s science advisor John Holdren reads a book by my Hive Overmind compatriots!

4) Pulsar-discoverer Jocelyn Bell-Burnell blogs.

5) My friend, the Aussie skeptic Richard Saunders appeared on national TV and handed an astrologer his head.

6) My evil twin Richard Wiseman is fun at parties. Here’s the video:

OK, good. That oughta keep y’all busy while I write up my next big astronomy post.

What do you get when you mix homeopathy with astrology?

This.

I should say that I have to give a kudo to the author for trying to set up a scientific experiment to see what would happen, but the experiment itself is so hopelessly flawed!

In fact it’s so wrong it’s hard to know where to start. The lack of double blinding. The single blinding still being able to influence the testers. The fact that all the testers were believers, and able to influence each other. The starting supposition that a) homeopathy works, and 2) astrology works (when neither does). A lack of clear results predicted so that conclusions (either negative or positive) could be drawn. The very subjective observations. And so on.

It’s clear from the article that the homeopath/astrologer means well, and is actually curious about all this. I wonder if there is any reliable way to take that curiosity, that well-meaning intention, and redirect it toward science? If there is — besides slowly and methodically banging the drum of reason — I’d love to know. A lot of people who believe in things like homeopathy and astrology and all that really are naturally curious, intelligent people, but somewhere down the line they strayed off the narrow path that winds its way through reality, and it would be nice to find a good way to nudge them back in the right direction.

Tip o’ the precessed vial of distilled water to Krelnik.

An article by D’Arcy Doran from the AP is reporting that back in WWII, the UK hired an astrologer to help them fight the Nazis.

Oddly enough, Louis de Wohl turned out to be a total fraud, and the British government soon found themselves in trouble.

A series of events led his work to be introduced to Sir Charles Hambro, the head of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, who hired de Wohl, and gave him a great apartment in an exclusive area of London. De Wohl eventual won the rank of army Captain. However, he soon became a bit of a problem, making grandiose claims about himself and publically embarrassing high-ranking officers.

His exploits are outlined in the article, but here’s my favorite part:

According to the released MI5 correspondence, senior officers offered a number of proposals on how to “dispose” of de Wohl, including interning him in a camp or moving him to a remote corner of the country. Two other options are blanked out.

I would love to see what was blanked out.

Eventually, the Brits caught on:

I have never liked Louis de Wohl _ he strikes me as a charlatan and an imposter,” reads the first line in the astrologer’s file. The letter is typical and appeared to be signed by Dick White, who went on to become the head of Britain’s domestic spy agency, MI5, in the 1950s.

[...]

“I have no doubt if I checked up his successes, I would see that he had more than an equal number of failures, but I have not the inclination nor the time to do so,” Hambro wrote.

Well, duh. But happily, nothing like that could ever happen in the US…