It’s even funnier that they believed you. It’s not true, right?
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rocks</font>
It’s close. Plugging in numbers for jupiter at closest approach vs. an 80 kg human at 1 meter, the back of the 'ole envelope suggests jupiter wins (assuming I haven’t bungled the arithmetic or slipped any powers of 10, which I’m quite prone to doing), but only by a factor of about 60, which isn’t much really. (This surprised me - intuitively I was expecting the human to win even at 1m). But if the human is standing 10 cm away instead of 1m, it wins, as long as you treat everything as a point mass. The breakeven distance where a point-mass human and jupiter have a similar effect seems to be about 12 to 14 cm. If jupiter is at its maximum distance from us, the breakeven distance is about 26-30 cm.
I didn’t work the numbers for close stars, but it’s got to be absurdly tilted in favor of the nearby human. Stars are pretty far off.
–
peas on earth
Is it possible that the day of one’s birth has some influence over one’s personality? Maybe.
I was born in February, so I grew up with birthday parties in school and trying to keep up my good behavior so close to Christmas. I was surrounded by pre-Valentine’s day hoopla in the stores and considered the rest of the year rather gray, for lack of a better word, as far as presents / special days to a child were concerned.
Contrast this with someone born in July. Completely different set of circumstances. Summer to them means not only no school, but also their birthday. They never had a ‘real’ birthday party in school, and the Xmas season has long since past. But their birthday parties were (for the most part) outside, and their year was broken up into roughly equal halves of kid-centered days. Or think of a December baby, whose birthday and Xmas are so close together that they are virtually synonymous.
What I have just said is an attempt to support the following assumption - people born roughly close together tend to have a set of shared experiences during their formative years based on the date of one of the most important and exciting days during their childhood.
I do acknowledge that these have an extraordinarily small influence over the lives / personalities of people, and of course acknowledge that the set of shared circumstances are very small and very vague. But they do exist. And, they are correlated with a position of the Earth around the sun, and that translates into an astrological sign. So match up an abstract set of personality-affecting circumstances with the concrete fact of that month’s sign, misplace the causation of said circumstances, and you have a slight reason to compare yourself with others of the same sign and believe that there is a grain, modicum, smidgen or particle of truth to astrological influences. Add a degree of superstition and one aspect of astrology may actually match personal (subjective) experience. The rest, of course, is complete horse-pucky. (The preceding may be H.P. as well, but they are my two cents and I can spend them wherever I want.)
Once in a while you can get shown the light
in the strangest of places
if you look at it right…
Not to mention the fact that lavishing all sorts of attention and gifts on a child when it’s his birthday is (A) a tradition of relatively recent origin, and (B) not practiced at all in many cultures that don’t happen to be descended from Western Europeans.
I knew two girls in high school–I’ll call them Molly and Vickie–who were both “Capricorns” (Molly, Dec. 29; Vickie, Jan. 1). The two girls apparently struck sparks off each other for ten years, ending when they (and I) graduated from high school.
Molly: older; dumpy; conniving, with “important” parents; rather like Alexis Colby of Dynasty.
Vickie: younger; shapely; kind and nice, with non “important” but fairly prasieworthy parents; perhaps like Krystle Carrington.
These two girls’ existence–born three days apart, albeit with a year in between–are convincing evidence, for me anyway, that astrology doesn’t pass muster.
Well, we might argue about whether a factor of 60 is close, but the point is that all the other folks at the fair are even farther away–that is, not even close.
A more intriguing possibility is that there is a gravitational effect that varies as the inverse of distance, rather than of the square of distance. This hasn’t been ruled out, entirely, and if such were the case, the effect would reach out to the farthest stars.
rocks
tracer, I believe its Taurus or gemini(your rising sign).
Woo hoo! I’ve got two rising signs! Thanks, Ms. cakes!
– tracer, who’s glad there’s no car called the Ford Gemini
Actually, Rythmdvl, I’ve heard that there is a pretty strong correlation between astrological sign and school perfomance. It has nothing to do with Jupiter, of course, rather it comes from the fact that we all (more-or-less) start first grade when we’re five years old, in SEPTEMBER. If you’re born in October, you’re a good ten months older than the kids born in August. Even if you split the kids by age, rounding up or down, classes still always start in September, so there is still up to a six month difference. That’s not much difference at age 30, but at age five it can represent a significant amount of development. An older kid has an advantage whose effects may carry forward long into the school career. Interesting, of course, but this correlation would be of origin much more recent than astrology.
I have to add the disclaimer that I heard the above long ago and it stayed with me, but I don’t have a cite for it - so you can disbelieve it if you wish and I won’t defend it.
Different school districts allow kids to start school with different birth months. In Santa Clara, where my parents lived in 1971, you could enter Kindergarten in September if you were going to be 5 years old at the start of the upcoming December. Other school districts doubtlessly had different rules.
So if any birth-month-based personality difference is caused by the month of entry into school, it would have to be tracked on a school-district-by-school-district basis, and I really doubt such an effect has been measured.
Oh, I should’ve been more specific. What I meant by the effects being different in different school districts is this:
Yes, school always starts in September. But in SOME school districts, a kid born in October can enter Kindergarten when he’s only 4 (4 going on 5), while in others he has to wait until he’s 5 going on 6.
I find the best way to disarm an astrology nut is to ask them if they don’t think labeling people by their astrological sign isn’t unlike labeling someone based on their skin color.
I tell them they’re being “horoscopist”.
It’s a made up word but it’s as valid as any astrological reading.
Perhaps the time of year one’s born has more with what time of year your parents were inclined to copulate. Me and my two sisters are all born in September. Which tells me my parents are either pratical about being warm in cold weather or maybe x-mas makes em feel amorous. Either would lend itself to influence in child rasing. This all is dependant of my parents having sex once a year. Which is one more than I’d like to think about.
tracer- No, you have either taurus OR gemini as your rising sign. In America, if you are born at sunrise, the rising sign is the same as your sun sign. So I believe you were born before sunrise…oh who cares really? 
And I started kindergarten at 4 because i was born in November. Everyone turning 5 in 1963 went to kindergarden, even if they were born Dec.31.
There were some letters to Nature, I think, that supported this. The studies were done on soccer players, I think, and were based on strict age group pairings based upon birthdates.
The shocking (but maybe not surprising) result was that not only did the older kids in an age group have an advantage, but that this advantage persisted even after they became adults and were no longer separated by age group. That was attributed to the extra attention and resources that they received throughout their formative years.
orangecakes wrote:
Hmmm … is there any place on Earth where, if you are born at sunrise, your Rising Sign isn’t the same as your sun sign?
Why, if I don’t know my Rising Sign, my horoscope might be off! 
The truth, as always, is more complicated than that.
Okay, since you mentioned it three times: Youre right. If you are born at sunrise, your s\rising sign IS the same as your sun sign. And you make a lot of typos too…
But I was thinking of latitude, longitude.
I think your rising sign isn’t the Only thing thats off…
As to the whole gravitational thing. You quite miss the point. What is relevent is not any given planet’s gravitational affect directly at any given point. Of course Jupiters grav effect on you is miniscule at any given point in time. The effect is not a matter of immediate impact but virtually limitless repetition.
Suppose you build a box a mile on a side, stuff it with ping-pong balls, in a state of complete rest (or in constant Brownian motion, whatever). Now suppose we magically introduce an ordinary tick-tock type pocket watch directly in the center of that mass of ping-pong balls. No other force enters into the equation. At some point in time all of the ping-pong balls in that cube will be oscillating tick-tock, tick tock. How long would that take? A year? Five. Fifty? Take all you want, we got billions. Sooner or later… And thats just the planets!
All the water on Earth has been thumping to the lunar rythymn long before water started taking itself seriously and thinking about shit. Lesson follows:Rythmic energy asserts order on chaos.End of Lesson
Some other time I’ll try to explain to you why astrologers haven’t poked their eyeballs out in self-disgust and impotent rage when someone advises them about Kepler, et. al. and thier astounding discoveries. As Der Cecil has pointed out, the struggle against ignorance is exhausting.
For the record, my sun sign is Scorpio, but my ascendant and half my planets are in Libra. Does this match with anything like the personality I show through my posts?
Okay, that would make you somewhat of a mediator, Libra planets are the kind that mkae you a person who sees both sides of an issue, debates it, then debates more, then finally can’t decide at all!lol…
Elucidator:
Your example would be more accurate if each ping pong ball was ticking to its own rhythm before the watch was introduced, and if the number and position of the ping pong balls were constantly shifting, and if watch rather than ticking constantly actually faded out sometimes and grew stronger at others, and if there had ever been any indication that microgravity effects were significant in personality deveopment.
For the same reason that young-earth creationists do not scream in mortification every time a dinosaur bone if unearthed.
I agree.
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*