I had a little fun at the expense of astrology last night when I was on Coast to Coast AM. I made a joke that if astronomers decide Pluto isn’t a planet, or that it is a planet but that there are also millions of other icy planets in the solar system beyond Neptune, astrologers will have to scramble to show how they knew this the whole time. Whatever they did, I would just sit back and laugh.
Well, that didn’t sit too well with an astrologer. She gets pretty huffy that astrologers don’t care what astronomers call a planet or not, and makes a big deal about other objects (and even non-objects) astrologers track.
She says an amazing number of funny and ironic things in the short blog entry.
… and some of us even track hypothetical planets which astrologers (not astronomers) predicted years ago would eventually be located “trans-Pluto†or beyond Pluto. In 1972 an ephemeris was published for “Transpluto”.
She negelects to mention what that object is, and if it’s even real. She links to a site that talks about Transpluto a great deal, but that site also neglects to actually identify what Transpluto is.
But it’s the irony I love best, as I always do:
Some folks don’t let their ignorance of a topic get in the way of voicing their opinions, even when the answer is obvious in their own writing.
Remember, this is coming from an astrologer.
She also says:
This has ever been true of skeptics who pontificate about astrology without seeking out what we really think first.
Ah, but in fact I have done research into astrology. I’ve done something that few if any astrologers have ever done: I’ve checked to see if it actually, y’know, works.
I’ll leave this with the most ironic thing she wrote:
Sorry to deprive you of a chuckle, Mr. Plait.
You didn’t, Madame Astrologer, I assure you.
