Skip to main content

The Math

What critics of astrology don't seem to know is that casting a chart by hand requires significant MATH ability.

I used to have probably two shelves worth of books, one of which was an expensive ephemerides. This is a thick book of charts listing the location of every heavenly body it covers once or twice a DAY.

When I cast my first chart -- MINE -- by hand in my teens, it took me several HOURS to do the interpolation. I could do that because I was the third strongest math student in my graduating high school class.

I can say that with confidence because I had four years of college equivalent math classes from eighth through eleventh grades and my senior year I was one of THREE students invited to attend a special ZERO hour class to continue my math education.

I declined because of my as yet undiagnosed medical condition. I was already missing the maximum number of days of school I could miss without being automatically flunked for the year and dragging myself to school sick much of the rest of the time while everyone called me lazy and a hypochondriac. There was no way I could take an EXTRA class that started an HOUR before school usually starts.

So I know beyond a shadow of a doubt I took MORE college level math in high school than anyone else in my graduating high school class EXCEPT the two people who accepted the invitation to that class.

So I knew how to calculate by a tedious iterative process the exact location of each heavenly body in the chart for the exact time and location of the chart in question.

It took HOURS and I had the highest SAT score of my graduating high school class.

So I bought my first programmable statistics calculator for a hundred dollars in my twenties as a homemaker because I found a formula in some book that allowed me to skip that. That was big money for a "stupid" hobby for a homemaker trying to make ends meet on one income.

But it meant calculating a chart now took a mere HOUR of my time instead of half my day or more.

I've told this story a few times over the years:

My GIS professor who was a surveyor by trade made an error on the blackboard and I argued it with him. He got fed up with a smarty pants student arguing with him and said "I bet you LUNCH I'm right." And not two minutes later said "I feel a lunch coming on."

He was probably in his fifties and I was a pretty woman in my thirties, so probably to avoid any awkward looking "date-like" interactions with a female student, he quietly slipped me twenty bucks instead of actually TAKING me to lunch.

All my respect BUT if I had been male, this was a potential networking opportunity that I missed out on and that fact was not lost on me.

The punchline is it was a lat-long (latitude longitude) calculation and I knew he was wrong because I'm an astrologer. Calculating lat-long for WHERE someone was born or the event in question took place is part of every chart. 

(Or WAS back in the day. You can probably google that these days.)

Fuck you prejudiced jackasses who think "Only an IDIOT would be interested in astrology."

No idiots allowed in the inner circle of people capable of doing the damn MATH involved, though no doubt there are plenty of idiots reading Sun Sign predictions and using online horoscope calculators that don't know enough to know it's wrong.

(I always put my info in first to see if it's accurate or not. Some aren't.)


Popular posts from this blog

House of Style

I defy every color typing system I have ever run across. Rest assured if some particular typing system doesn't work for you, I am sympathetic. No color system works for me, but my astrological chart fits my colors. So, weirdly, I found astrology helpful for sorting out my wardrobe, of all things. I briefly had a separate site for talking about astrology and fashion. This post is step one in the process of folding that information into this site and shutting that one down. That site was a half baked idea for a long time and was finally being developed because I am fleshing out my ideas for a clothing line that's been a half baked idea for even longer. That site was originally envisioned as my latest attempt to try to figure out how to make money via my knowledge of astrology that never turned into a viable business idea, as noted here recently . You can use your Natal astrological chart to try to look your best by looking primarily at your Rising Sign and any factors ...
Read more

Japan -- A Funny Little Hypothesis

My understanding is that most Japanese do not believe in Western astrology and, yet, it's a common topic of discussion. They routinely tell people what their Sun sign is in casual conversation. I think most likely what is going on there is that they don't find it threatening because they don't take it seriously, so it's a good topic for making small talk, and it also solves a somewhat unique social challenge for them. In Japanese language and culture, my understanding is you address people using honorifics on a routine basis and there is a long list of honorifics to choose from. Which one is correct depends in part on which of you is older. All well, fine and good except that it's rude to ask someone their age or birth date. So how does one determine who is older and who is younger? Sometimes this is obvious. A child addressing a grown-up, for example. Anyone can tell at a glance who is older and who is younger. But what if you are all school children in t...
Read more

Happy Belated Birthday

The title is sarcastic. I was assaulted the day after my sixtieth birthday. Around 9:30 or 10 p.m. as it was getting dark, someone called out "Who's in the tent?" We didn't immediately reply in part because there was traffic noise, he was likely drunk as he smelled of beer and was slurring his words and my sons didn't immediately understand what he was saying, plus it's a strange thing for someone to ask. Usually, someone is asking if you are someone they already know and promptly leave when it turns out you aren't. Before the tent door was fully open, he hit me in the face with a heavy metal object that turned out to be a gun and justified the assault with "You didn't tell me your name." It was a brief scuffle, thirty seconds or a minute, and the first physical altercation of that sort of my life and I was hit repeatedly in the face and left quite bloody.  Early on, I picked up my phone because I've been in other confrontations that ende...
Read more