Anyway, here is a piece by Aaron Rowe in The Wired on the topic:

While searching for a soulmate on several online dating sites, I caught myself disregarding anyone who professed their belief in astrology.

At roughly the same time, a friend called my attention to this clip from The Big Bang Theory, which thoroughly picks astrological superstition apart.

Am I being too hard on my New Age counterparts?

In my book, astrology is a silly shortcut for understanding how the world works, but so is judging people by their spiritual beliefs.

Scientists are sometimes guilty of using ridiculous heuristics too! For example, principal investigators sometimes hire graduate students based on grades and standardized test scores rather than their ability to work well in a laboratory.
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I think Rowe is too dismissive of belief systems as an indicator of how a relationship can develop, at least for me. Most of my friends are agnostic or atheist, but not all, and many colleagues and acquaintances, some of my students, and co-workers, etc. have various religious beliefs (including astrology, I assume) and this does not interfere at all with our interactions. In fact, since I first penned this essay I have developed two relationships with people who are nominally not atheists. One is an Evangelical Christian whom I chose to believe is an atheist down inside somewhere not too deep, and who has many other qualities that have drawn us into each other’s orbits in mutually helpful and productive ways. The other is a person who is very clear on the concepts of science and medicine but nonetheless possesses parallel new age beliefs. Again, a mutually respectful and caring relationship is not affected by these beliefs at all.

Sometimes annoyances can happen, and one should never be afraid to respectfully point out that no, it is not OK to assume that any “good” person must also be “spiritual, at least” and so on. I don’t hold ignorance about atheism against anyone, any more than I would want a Hindu to hold ignorance about Hinduism against me.

But a pair bond is different, in my opinion. At least for me, there are conversations that I need to have that would be impossible with someone who was religious, astrologically inclined, spiritual, or whatever. This seems to hold at least somewhat true with other loved ones in my life. One of my best friends is an atheistic Buddhist scientist, and we totally love each other and have those conversations, but I think her Buddhism is not even close to a religious perspective, and in her version of Buddhism, the analog to “heaven” is you die and then there is eternal nothingness. Relatives, including mine and Amanda’s, are increasingly religious as you go out from Ego, sort of like a Religio-Cultural red-shift effect. That’s interesting. And I know that if there were conversations that I need to have that would not work with Amanda, I could find satisfaction with others with whom I’m very close.

But on a day to day basis, religion, skepticism, science, the evolution-creationism “debate” and a number of other topics are so important and ubiquitous (for me, given what I do and who I am), that I need to be mated with a person with very similar views.

I am not really of two minds of this, even though I’m on the cusp of Gemini.

The cave/mine distinction is important in this case. The holes in the earth into which the children had gone, set a camp fire, and suffocated on the carbon monoxide from that fire, were dug as mines by a company once known as Minnesota Mining and Manufacture, now known to you as 3M (Scotch Tape, Scotchguard, Post-Its, and more importantly, sandpaper). The fact that the reporters were early on as the story developed randomly switching between calling the holes caves or mines, mentioned early on during the multi-hour ordeal that they were 3M mines, then stopped talking about 3M and referred to them thereafter only as caves, causes me to guess (but I do not know) that influential voices in the reporter’s ears directed them towards discretion and away from truth. That could just be me not trusting enormous wealthy corporations.

But never mind that. It was the count of the dead bodies that were being taken from the mines that relates to the present discussion. To make a long story short here is what I saw happening as I watched the live news reports on three different channels:

The bluff was heavily wooded, with pathways leading up to the mines from a road down below, and down to the mines from above, with streets and structures both above and below the steep bluff face. Police had the area closed off to everyone, including reporters, at the top and bottom, and there were emergency vehicles all over the place. Reporters, including camera-operators, were therefore all stationed in a ring around the cordoned off zone, watching rescue workers going in and out but not seeing what was actually happening in the mine or at the mine’s entrance. But they could see first responders dragging stretchers in and out. On more than one occasion, a stretcher with a body on it was seen being carried out of the woods. But, it was seen by more than one reporter, one above the bluffs and one below the bluffs. So it went, roughly, like this:

News Anchor: “Joe Carpenter, you’re above the action there, what do you see from the residential neighborhood above the caves?”

Joe: “That’s Right, Mary, I’m looking down on the site of this tragic event and I am seeing right now …. our camera is showing it, I think …. emergency rescue workers taking … carrying … a stretcher with what looks like a person on it.”

News Anchor: “Joe, can you tell us what else you see … oh wait, hold on a second Joe, Gladys Day is down with the Sheriff below the cliff and has something to report … Gladys, what have you got?”

Gladys: “That’s right, Mary, I’m standing here near the Sheriff’s operation’s center and the Sheriff is not telling us anything yet, but I can tell you that moments ago a stretcher with a person on it was pulled out of the woods and put in an ambulance, but the ambulance is not going anywhere, and the form I saw on the stretcher was totally covered up. I think that means, sadly, that a deceased person has been recovered from the cave.

News Anchor: “For those just tuning in, we are witnessing, a ‘Get More on News Four’ exclusive, as two individuals have been removed from the cave on the Mississippi River Cliffs in Saint Paul. One is believed to be deceased, and the other, we are not sure of…”

Thusly, one body was counted as two, one dead, one perhaps alive. And this sort of absurd mixup continued as the body count went up and down and all over the place for several hours. At one point, if I recall correctly, a handful of empty stretchers were carried out by rescue workers … they were done taking out bodies and had no need of them … and the death count shot up temporarily by that number.

You’ve seen this happen.

The Breaking News this morning in the Twin Cities was showing on all three news stations that I was cruising for a weather report:

Channel 5: “An armored car has been robbed in the 900 block of University Avenue….”

Channel 9: “An armored car has been robbed in at the corner of Rice and Larpentuer….”

Channel 12: “An armored car has been robbed in on Energy Park Drive….”

Holy crap! Three armored car robberies, in three different locations in Saint Paul! Wow!

All three, of course, were the same car, and in this case, Channel 12 had it right.

Today, someone bothered to write a story about how astrological signs were all wrong, that the planets were not really in the constellations astrologers claim them to be in, and there really are 13, not 12, constellations. The main point is that the stars have moved continuously in relation to each other and the earth (as expected) and the cosmic geometry that underlies Astrology never accounted for that movement. It is as though all the astrologers are waiting for a bus but unaware that the bus schedule has been radically altered.

So, Astrology, as it turns out, not only can’t work, and doesn’t work, but it’s being done wrong anyway.

I’ve always wondered why Astrologers didn’t bother to adjust for the actual movements of the planets and stars. I’ve asked some of them. They don’t know either. I know they know that the actual movement of heavenly bodies is not what the ephemera show. There must be some reason they haven’t fixed that. Of course, if they do fix it, if they do add the 13th constellation and take account of the actual movement of stars and planets, maybe it will work!!! That would totally make me LOL. I might even ROFL. But I’m not betting on it.

Anyway, it was interesting to hear the following coming from a national news reporter this morning: “It turns out that due to a wobble in the earth, a thirteenth constellation has moved into the Zodiac, and this has caused all of the other Astrological observations to go off and require adjustments.”

So, the Astrology can’t work. And it doesn’t work. And, it’s broken. And, the news reporters can’t get straight how it’s broken right. Not that it really matters that we understand exactly how something like Astrology does not work. But still….