When I'm not confused for a cosmetologist, you know, because of 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, "Oh, okay, that's an astrologer, I'm not an astrologer," but now I just, I kind of lean into it.

I'm like, "Ooh, you're going to get a letter from the IRS next week," and that lump on your ass, that's... You mean you're playing games with them? Yeah. So you don't believe in astrology? There's no evidence for astrology. In fact, there's, you know, many, many random controlled trials, double-bund study that showed not only is it, it's almost counter to the evidence, you know, like when 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 almost anti-correlated, you know, with what reality is. So no, there's certainly no validity to that. And I had a 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 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, #fail for the Babylonians, but they divided it up into 12 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. Oh, okay. So it's determined by the position of the sun, what constellation was the sun in on the day you were born, September 26th.

So when the, that means that the sun was in the constellation Virgo, oh no, you were a Libra? Libra. I don't know if 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 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 preexisting 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. The spin of that disk, all things have a spin associated with them, like a figure skater, you know, 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, you 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 6,000, 5,000 years ago.

It's 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 Ophiuchuses 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 histories, past, futures, and there's no predictive power to it. And that's what science is about, right? You 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 had become my wife in the beginning, she kind of thought it's fun. Maybe we'll go see 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, "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," and I was playing kind of a little bit of a jerk sometimes.

So I said, "I just want to confirm. Gemini is born in September. I'm born September 9th." She said, "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 philosophy of science, Karl Popper, others, it's unfalsifiable, and you cannot be proven right.

It's so flexible. You know, you're going to find challenges. The stock market is going to fluctuate. Political turmoil will reign. They're so flexible, it can accommodate any story. And that's a hallmark of non-science or sometimes anti-scientific thinking.