Astrology is crap

Here's a great Nature article about how astrology is crap. Not that we really needed a journal to tell us that, but it's a good reference for those pesky people who believe that garbage.

Some good excerpts:

I am pleased to report that, as Shawn Carlson has noted, "astrology failed to perform at a level better than chance" (Nature 318, 419–425; 1985). The results from my classes are: 8.0% (n = 163 students), 8.4% (n = 155), 7.0% (n = 143), 8.0% (n = 138) and 8.0% (n = 100). In other words, as John Maddox has commented "astrology is a pack of lies ... There is no evidence that the positions of the planets can affect human behaviour" (Nature 368, 185; 1994).

Finally, it is worth reporting that my students are so engaged by this exercise that they actually want to use Newton's law of universal gravitation to calculate force values. In case you are curious, Mars, at its present distance of 264 million kilometres from Earth, is exerting a force of approximately 50 nanonewtons on your being.