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Pluto's 3 Moons and a Probe to Study Them
It doesn't come easy writes "For those of you keeping score, Pluto now officially has three moons, with more possibly to follow. The newfound moons orbit about 27,000 miles (44,000 kilometers) from Pluto, more than twice as far as Charon, Pluto's other satellite. They are 5,000 times dimmer than Charon. The moons were found using the Hubble Space Telescope. For now, Pluto is the only Kuiper Belt object known to have satellites. Some nice images of Pluto and its moons are included in links. Enjoy!" Relatedly IZ Reloaded writes "NASA says the Atlas 5 rocket that will carry the New Horizons Pluto probe has suffered slight damage thanks to Hurricane Wilma. New Scientist reports: "The Atlas 5 rocket stands within a construction hangar at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Florida's east coast. As Wilma rolled though the region on 24 October, fierce 122-kilometer-per-hour winds tore holes in the hangar's 83-meter-tall door and caused minor damage to the rocket inside.""
Now that Pluto's been confirmed to have more than one moon, what will than mean for the old debate over whether Pluto or Charon's the actual planet? Ought to be fun to watch...
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
There will be no moon probing while I'm around!
So not official. RTFA. That's no moon....that's a canditate.
And they are still going to scrap this suck-ass telescope, right?
12:50 - press return.
Nice? The photographs are a bunch of small white dots! Does anyone else see real photographs? I guess he is referring to the "artistic conceptual drawings"
For now, Pluto is the only Kuiper Belt object known to have satellites.
My good friend UB313 would have to disagree.
There are actually several known KBOs with moons. Or was the submitter being overly litteral and meant multiple moons?
Unlike what the poster said, Pluto is not the only one with a moon.. html
Various other KBOs do, including Xena :
http://www.planetary.org/news/2005/xena_moon_1003
I hope we have our XK-PLUTO nuclear-powered bombers ready for the Old Ones. Me? I'm going to take a little trip to XK-Masada.
Pluto now officially has three moons
More like "four big asteroids are gravitating around each other beyond the orbit of Neptune".
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Pluto is a planet, not an object. Anything else is either cultural revisionism or solar system wide discrimination.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
...it's not even official yet. The objects are believed to be orbiting Pluto, but there has been no independent confirmation they actually are, and the IAU hasn't (yet) responded to the submitted claim.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Does that mean we can call them "Cerebus" collectively?
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
...do even the jokes have dupes?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Seems hubble is doing something useful every time you turn around. And NASA says the Hubble Telescope needs to be retired.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Is it really a big deal when we name something a moon? Its just a matter of relativity. A planet, a moon, an asteroid, a rock... they're all the same thing, that varies by degrees. I suppose the things orbital path is of interest, but how much can we really learn just by applying labels? We didn't learn anything about the true scientific nature of those bodies, we just named them. I think I'll name them Susanna, Melinda and Jim.
-Da3vid-
These "moons" are only 30 and 100 miles across. Mars' Phobos and Deimos, widely thought to be captured asteroids, are thousands of kilometers across. These are PUNY. If we could somehow gather up all the junk orbiting Earth and pack it together, we'd probably have a "moon" about that size, too.
I hate the one hundred and twenty character limit for signatures with an all-enveloping, all-destroying, incredible pass
The slashdot article says Pluto is the only Kuiper Belt Object to have a moon. Not so: Tenth Planet Has A Moon
has really caused us a lot of grief in classifying heavenly bodies and discovering them. Not only does it interfere with scientific terminology, it hampers understanding of average people. We should just kick Pluto out and accept that we have 8 planets, not 9. Everyone would be happier (except Pluto).
...on where it kept them. The underworld is a BIG place to hide things you don't want discovered.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Even if you rolled all the rockets we have ever launched, and all the fuel we packed into them, I doubt it they would form a sphere even a single kilometer in diameter.
A Saturn V was about 20 meters in diameter, and about 100 meters tall, more or less. Volume of a cylinder is pi r^2 * length. That would make the volume of a Saturn V about pi * 2500 meters^3.
The volume of a sphere is 3/4 * pi r^3. The volume of a sphere one kilometer in diameter would be pi * 93,750,000 meters^3. That would be volumne of something like the prelaunch volume of 37,000 Saturn Vs. The payload of a rocket is a fraction of the mass of the entire thing. Let's say 1%. Most rockets are much smaller than a Saturn V. Payloads launched into low earth orbits decay within decades, like Mir, or Spacelab.
It wouldn't surprise me if the volume of all the working satellites, and space detritus, that remain in orbit would be less than the prelaunch volume of a single Saturn V.
As Wilma rolled though the region on 24 October, fierce 122-kilometer-per-hour winds tore holes in the hangar's 83-meter-tall door
Oh please, 'twas but a mere breeze. That hangar's falling apart anyway.
Mix the failings of Usenet with the shortcomings of the World Wide Web and the result is slashdot.
Would this help us any? Probably, yes. Because planets are of mixed composition, they must have formed in the very early accretion disc from the sun. Because asteroids and comets are relatively uniform, they must have formed AFTER centrifugal forces had separated out the elements - lighter elements to the outside (which is why comets contain a lot of hydrogen) and heavier elements towards the center (asteroids are based on iron and nickel, depending on location).
The label, by this scheme, would then indicate composition, structure and time of formation, as these three properties are inter-related. On the other hand, we can go by mass or diameter and learn relatively little - which I suspect is the way the IAU will go, because that's something astronomers can measure easily. Easy != (interesing || useful). In this case, easy is pretty useless and will be subject to future argument.
I'm sure there are better methods of classifying, but I firmly believe the only useful method of classification is one that will allow predictions to be made and tested. The periodic table of the elements, for example, as a way of depicting valence theory is exceptionally useful. You can make useful predictions about groups of elements or even individual elements, based on the position in the table. Astronomical classifications should be no less useful and (given that we've far more powerful ways of obtaining, classifying and representing data today than early chemists) really should be a far MORE (Moore?) powerful tool.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You might be a troll but I am an astrologer....
Absolutely nothing. From an astrological perspective, the moons will always be at the same place on your chart as Pluto and thus would make no difference to the chart's interpretation.
I get sick and tired of astrologers needlessly multiplying entities by making postulates that are not only patently untrue but useless and stupid anyway, like the theory that there is a shadow earth in our orbit on the other side of the sun. If you want something more useful without the need to go to such unparsimonious ideas, there are always the Arabic Parts (the Part of Fortune being the most famous, but for questions of vegetable markets and plants, there is also the Part of Melons and Cucumbers).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Calling it a 'moon' implies that it orbits something which orbits the Sun. Calling it a 'rock' wouldn't.
"I get sick and tired of astrologers needlessly multiplying entities by making postulates that are not only patently untrue but useless and stupid anyway,"
So... basically, you're sick of astrologers being astrologers? In as much as every scientific test ever run on astrological predictions has indicated that the theory doesn't work. And in as much as you have to postulate some as-yet unknown, unseen and apparently undetectable force between people and planets is what makes the whole thing work. But appart from that, you mean?
It is clear that it did not form from the same planetary disk that spawned the planets from Neptune on in.
I don't understand this, can you elucidate? Are you saying there was another planetary disk at some other time? Or that Pluto and friends wandered in from interstellar space?
If Pluto can get more moons, maybe Earth will start getting some new ones too!
That'll be helpful when we've run over our current moon and can't fit any more people on it anymore.
Can't you tell?
What happened to the one they sent to URANUS?
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
How does the moon's distinct lack of heavier elements fall in line with the moon being created at the same time?
Well, there are usually two aspects to the impact ejection theory. The idea is that the earth was struck and:
1) ejected dust that formed the moon and
2) knocked the earth's axis so that it we have the tilt that generates the seasons.
Now, there are two issues that I have with this theory:
First, it presumes that the earth's equator was very close to the ecliptic. This is not something I can take for granted given that the tilts of other axes are:
Neptune: 30 degrees
Uranus: 98 degrees
Saturn: 25 degrees
Jupiter: 3.1 degrees
Mars: 25.2 degrees
Venus: 177.36 degrees
Mercury: 0 degrees
Of the eight major plants, axis tilts are sufficiently low to allow for this sort of idea only on Jupiter and Mercury. It seems unreasonale to me to think that planets such as Saturn were somehow knocked off axis by impacts. Also Venus has no moon and it seems unreasonable to indicate that it was knocked off its axis. Instead the axis of rotation seems to have been decided on a local variation.
Even if one imagines that the earth had a very low axis tilt originally, the ability to simultaniously eject enough dust to cause the moon to form witnin six degrees of the ecliptic seems a bit of a stretch to me, especially since such an impack would *also* have had to occur nearly exactly on the equator and still managed knock the earth off its axis.
The reason why these objections have generally been disregarded by the astronomical community is a theory which posits that a type of asteroid called "carbonaceous chondrites" formed the original planetessimals from which all rocky planets originated. While mercury never fit this model, it was generally assumed that these formed the basis for Venus, the Earth, Mars, etc. It was therefore believed that one would be able to form models of the interior structure of Mars consistant with the projections of this theory. As the moon clearly didn't fit, the impact theory nicely solved this problem.
However, it now appears that the idea that carbonaceous chondrites form the basic building block from which rocky planets were formed has now had some very large holes torn in it in that no model which fits the existing data on Mars can support this theory of the formation of Mars. Absent this theory, I can think of no good reason to subscribe to impact-emission theory of lunar origins, as it seems simpler to think that the moon may have formed as a smaller dustball forming from lighter particles which ended up further from the early earth in the same way that the structure of the gas giant systems (the outer planets and their moons) mirrors structurally the Sun and inner planets.
I could be wrong as I have no astronomy degree, but at least it is informed inaccuracy....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
All right, I can understand that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have zillions of moons because they're big mommas with a lot of gravity, and when you're very generously rounded -- well, you just naturally attract a lot of trash. Fact of life.
But now even puny Pluto is getting into the act. Three moons, when Mercury has zero and Mars but two. What gives? Why are moons more common in a general way in the outer Solar System than the inner? This is odd. Is it all captured from the Kuiper Belt? Did the solar wind when the Sun was T-Tauri blow all the moon-making crap out of the inner system, but not the outer? Is there some reason why whirlpools in the nebula are more probably further out? Inquiring minds want to know!
So... basically, you're sick of astrologers being astrologers? In as much as every scientific test ever run on astrological predictions has indicated that the theory doesn't work. And in as much as you have to postulate some as-yet unknown, unseen and apparently undetectable force between people and planets is what makes the whole thing work. But appart from that, you mean?
Well, astrology as a detailed field probably lacks the ability to create atomic, testable hypotheses which can then be repeatably tested. So as a field it does not admit to the scientific method. Same with any other occult field. So to me science will likely never be able to prove or disprove astrology.
Apart from that....
Old-school astrology seems to be focused on observable planets (representing abstract concepts which can manifest in various ways) and on mathematical derivations thereof. The Arabic Parts, for example, are mathematic derivations of the position of sets of planets (if planets are words, Arabic Parts are sentences). If new concepts are required, they can be derived via new Arabic Parts (as per Guido Bonnatti's 12th century treatise). It was similarly believed that there was no mechanism by which astrology worked-- that charts had correlation-based rather than causation-based value (see Paracelsus's treatise on the subject-- that the planets are mere markers for aspects of the self).
Now, new-school astrologers, feeling besieged by science have tended to try to pull the whole intelligent-design thing (only they did it first). The idea that the planets have some direct impelling force on us is quite frankly laughable. Similarly, they have abandoned the semantic constructs such as Arabic Parts in favor of imagined planets. Uranian astrology, for example, posits seven additional planets beyond Neptune. There are those who try to base things on some planet they call Vulcan (a Transpluto-based object), and there are those who believe that the sun hides a shadow earth in our orbit but on the other side of the sun.
Furthermore, I have heard astrologers talk about appeasing the planets. WTF? Ok, maybe one can choose how some things manifest, but if one gets into the habit of appeasing lights in the sky, well, I will have nothing to do with that mentality.
So you have pinned me down pretty well-- an astrologer being opposed to most of what goes on in modern astrology.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
What kind of astrology are we talking about, then, if not the theory that predicts people's futures? That is inherently a testable theory and it keeps failing. Which never disuades any of its adherents, as far as I can see. Just as I expect we won't disuade you here.
So what DO you believe, if not in a predictive theory?
What kind of astrology are we talking about, then, if not the theory that predicts people's futures?
Ok.... Let me explain a few things to you about my concept of astrology. First the most important form of astrology is personal (birth chart) astrology that tells people about themselves. Additionally we have the ability to look at the character of specific time frames (via solar return charts, progressions, transits), and answer specific questions (horary astrology, though many times, the chart just says: no definite answer at the moment).
In each of these cases, the planets are stand-ins for extremely abstract semantic concepts. The entire chart is like a technical manual and one really needs the whole thing to say anything about it. In other words, the fact that the sun in someone's chart is in Scorpio has very little impact by itself. You also have houses, aspects, etc. that create a general picture. Because the planets are stand-ins for sufficiently abstract concepts, and because the chart is sufficiently complex, I think it is impossible to come up with atomic hypotheses which can be tested with any repeatibility. In essence, any scientific experiment I can think of would be so heavily flawed that I would expect (as an astrologer) that it would conclude very little correlation value in and of itself. In essence, I think that science has reasonably showed that there is no impelling force of the plantes. But I have never claimed there was (reread my prior post where I called this notion laughable).
Instead, the planets represent abstract concepts which can manifest internally or externally in a variety of different ways (perhaps in different ways in different times). Free will exists within this framework because we have a fair bit of control over how things manifest. This is again in line with the older writings from Ptolomy to Paracelsus.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"as-yet unknown, unseen and apparently undetectable force"
Gravity is the basis of astrology. Much like the sun and moon control the tides on earth, so do the planets and stars. But they also manipulate the water molecules (humans are 75%(?) water) in our bodies. Similarly, electrical and magnetic fields (and electro-magnetic) to a lesser extent, from neighbouring celestial bodies also affects everyday life here on earth. A control of this "experiment" would be to remove all gravitational, electrical and magnetic forces from the earth and replay evolution. Life on earth would be very different from what it currently is.
"I get sick and tired of astrologers needlessly multiplying entities by making postulates that are not only patently untrue but useless and stupid anyway"
Ya me too. To date there hasn't been a single scientifically-backed comment made by astrologers anywhere that hasn't been labled as coincidence. Astrologers simply do not have the capacity to make any comments what-so-ever. Especially when new moons, stars, blackholes (etc.) are still being discovered. How reliable can these charts be...
Giving astrologers their due, they suggested that human nature is controlled by celestial bodies. But do they serve any other purpose? I think not.
..then it's lowercase-k, and a space between the number and 'km'. Uppercase-K means kelvin.
Is this just an attempt to keep Pluto in the "planet" catagory? Because it seems like someone says "So what makes Pluto so special? We've got dozens of KBOs that big and bigger" and some people refuse to consider the idea that Pluto is nothing special. Now we suddenly have 3 moons on Pluto?
I don't know. I'm probably just crazy, but it seems possible to me.
Er, sure, we feel gravity. The water in our bodies does by EXACTLY the same amount (in terms of acceleration) as everything else. So why single out water? And why the planets and not the nearby mountains or houses which have MUCH greater gravitational pulls.
Electromagnetic fields don't track, either. Earth's field is only 0.3-0.6 Gauss. And we don't even FEEL any fields from neighboring bodies since they fields are excluded by Earth's. (Also, the fields are terrifically weak this far away. The strength falls off very rapidly with distance.) And Venus and Mars don't even HAVE global fields, so why are they even included?
Sure, if you got rid of gravity, live on Earth would be different. We wouldn't be on Earth, for one thing. And we wouldn't be adapted to gravity. But that statement has nothing to do with astrology at all.
Just 'cause there are forces in the universe, it doesn't mean astrologers are right. None of the forces known behave as astrologers require them to. Anyone who knows even high school science should instantly recognize the fact that they're just throwing around terms without even trying to explain how things could possibly be doing what they claim.
"Giving astrologers their due, they suggested that human nature is controlled by celestial bodies."
Which, the Sun and the Earth? No disagreement there. But they weren't the first ones to suggest that. Ever since people were smart enough to name things, they probably realized that the Sun and Earth played a role.
The other celestial bodies? How as astrology ever made a predictive claim about the how they control life on Earth that's every panned out?
You're still making predictions which can be (and have been) tested. You're just starting the process of making it so vague as to be worth no more than talking to someone and letting him or her help you through your introspection. At that point, that isn't astrology (why bother with the stars and planets?), it's just therapy/psychology. And I prefer mine without the mumbo-jumbo and I can get the same results from friends, but at no charge.
*ducks*
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and of course the Sun.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
that other body have a moon? Xena or somethin' ?
Is this anything like the probe placed "inside" Cartman?
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
1) The impactor, known alternately as Orpheus or Theia, has been modeled to have been about the size of Mars, and to have hit Earth at a very oblique angle. 2) The absolute best evidence we have for the theory is that the moon has essentially no iron core. All the other terrestrial planets do. As it turns out, the comosition of the moon is remarkably similar to that of Earth's mantle (oxygen/silicon). It is theorized that most of Theia's core merged with our own. Earth's mean density is, if I recall, something on the order of 5500 kg/m^3. The moon has a mean density of something like 3300 kg/m^3. If you were to take out the Earth's iron/nickle core and replace it with mantle material, it would have a mean density similar to that of the moon. 3) As an astronomy minor and having taken planetary formation courses, I've never heard anything about carbonaceous chondrite cores forming the basic building blocks of planets. Carbon, counterintuitively, isn't even too abundant on Earth. Or anywhere else for that matter. Or rather, there certainly is a lot of it, but not compared to oxygen, silicon, iron, aluminum, etc. 4) You can't compare the models of planetary formation in the inner solar system to the outer. Not on a 1:1 basis. The outer planets are significantly larger than the inner because they formed past the frost line (about halfway through the asteroid belt). After this line, ice stays in crystalline form, allowing the rocky starts of the other planets to aggregate much more mass, both planetary and gaseous (the rocky core of Jupiter, at least, is probably about 20 times the size of Earth). With this much more mass, they can more easily capture smaller planetismals, which become moons. It would be far, far easier for a Jupiter to capture Luna than for Earth. 5) As alluded to in the beignning of this post, computer simulations have been done on both the capture and impact theories (including many variations of). The impact theory works. The capture does not. 6) That we have plate tectonics, significant ocean basins, etc, could also be construed as evidence for the giant impact theory. Venus has no moons, and there is little evidence that it ever underwent plate tectonics. The same goes for Mars, and I assume Mercury, though I am not sure on the latter. But the most important thing here is #2. That's the smoking gun.
You're still making predictions which can be (and have been) tested.
Usually in the sense that "Hmm. Based on these charts, it looks there is a chance that if I approach such and such this way, that I might be able to accomplish such and such." For me astrology is very results-oriented.
On the other hand, charts contain so much information that occasionally I have missed very disasterous things that made perfect sense in retrospect. For example, there was one woman who I was in love with for a while just after I graduated college. For some reason she always found herself in danger whenever we planned on getting together (yet we talked for hours every night on the phone). It was as if I was a catalyst for seemingly unrelated danger in her life. Explaining why would take more time here than it is worth, but after an ex-boyfriend threatened to kill her she left town and we lost touch (probably for the better). If you take a materialist/scientific approach, I had nothing to do with the misfortunes that befell her (incomplete medical advice regarding prescriptions, angry ex-boyfriends, etc). Yet the birth charts showed clearly that my very presence in her life triggered her danger, and she would trigger patterns of loss for me.
More recently, I have made one or two very serious predictions which have turned out to be accurate (one involving my wife). Probably the most startling one was when I told a lesbian woman that I thought her progressed chart indicated that she may be experiencing a new interest in men and she told me that she had recently been dating a man who she then found out was married.
If you are so convinced that there is nothing to it, I would be willing to take an hour or so and write up your chart. You can send the information to chris.travers@gmail.com (I would need the birth date, time off the birth certificate, and place). This way you can judge yourself. This would include just the planets, houses, and aspects. Maybe fixed stars if I feel like it.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Sorry, forgot to format it. Hope you guys can follow.
Can we have this in imperial units, this is an American website and an American space program we're talking about here...
Does anyone other than this British guy find this comment deliciously ironic?
Water was just one instance. there's carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and helium and gold and silver and xenon and - you can include the whole list if you want.
It's everywhere, all around us. Yes, yes, even the mountains too.
yes no, anything and everything that exerts some kind of force on us impacts our lives in some way or another, however miniscule.
Maybe astrologers weren't the first to suggest it, but it's valid none-the-less. The other celestial bodies: astrologers haven't. yet. but one day some punk-a$$ will wake up and say "Oh, NO WONDER we were wrong.. there's this blackhole we forgot to add to our charts that's throwing everything off balance"
Did you know know about the danger your were supposed to present the woman before you got involved, or was it something you found out afterward. If it's the former, why didn't you avoid her in the first place if you have faith in astrology? If the latter, it's not very convincing to predict something after the fact.
Also, for the bisexual friend, it's not a prediction if she already started dating the guy. It's hard to say what you might have noticed, even unconsciously, about her behavior. That's the trouble with a lot of this sort of thing: most of the evidence that convinces people of the effectiveness occurs under very uncontrolled conditions. When controlled conditions are used, the results turn up null, but that doesn't convince people.
I'm not an astronomer either, having just taken a couple of courses in college, but my professors seemed to frame the massive impact theory as more 'the best explanation we have for right now.' It had the advantage of explaining things like the size of the moon, the composition, its unusual distance and orbital velocity (which just don't fit for a capture). It's not perfect (especially if the larger solar system creation model doesn't hold up), but it's the only explanation that doesn't have especially glaring holes in it.
hot foreign sheep.
The Mi-Go might find out about us...
I'm afraid of their brain canisters!
Did you know know about the danger your were supposed to present the woman before you got involved, or was it something you found out afterward. If it's the former, why didn't you avoid her in the first place if you have faith in astrology? If the latter, it's not very convincing to predict something after the fact.
As I mentioned, it was discovered after the fact, but it provides a link between otherwise unrelated activities. And it was discovered by applying a technique that I was studying at the time-- the problem had to do with fixed stars and their aspects with the planets in each of our charts, and how tendencies towards danger and grief were triggered by eachother's charts.
Part of the problem with predictions is that astrology does *not* determine events. It doesn't even push them towards some definite conclusion. Instead it provides an abstract map from which many things can manifest. Saying "This will happen to you" is almost never justified IMO regarding astrology even where you have complete information and analysis. This is why I have said that I do not believe that there is any capacity of the scientific method to shed much light on astrology except in debunking the attempts to make it a pseudoscience (which IMO it is not-- it is more along the lines of meditative of spiritual disciplines).
Science has no more disproved astrology in the sense I practice it than it has disproved the existance of one or more gods. What science has done is trim the domains and assumptions that people use to justify some beliefs. As I have said, I do not believe that it is possible to come up with atomically testable hypotheses regarding astrology because the map is two abstract and too complex. Astrology is as indeterminant with regard to a specific final outcome as the colapse of a single Schoedinger's wave, but has an irreduceable complexity which effectively precludes repeatible testing.
Furthermore, there is a second untestable assumption behind the older versions of astrology which conflicts with an untestible assumption behind the Scientific method. The scientific method presumes that the tester and phenominon being tested are separate and distinct (at least to a point, though the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum physics has been controversial in part because it breaks this assumption*), but Neoplatonism from which the philosophy behind the older astrological tradition formed, assumped that the external and internal worlds were mirrors of eachother, and that changes in one necessarily create changes in the other. In the case of the separation assumption of the scientific method (which is important for the criteria of repeatibility), this assumption is an assumption of convenience. Neoplatonism arrived at their conclusion by a systematic process involving comparing religions (I think they have some assumptions that are problematic, but this is indeed not one of them).
* Heisenberg in "Physics and Philosophy" interprets the Copenhagen Interpretation in a little bit of a more traditional way. He basically argues that quantum events are effected by all quantum particles in the universe, and that this includes the quantum particles in the observer. In other words, it is not that the wave doesn't collapse in the absense of observation, but rather that without observation, you cannot know how it collapsed. Note however, that the observer as part of the experiment precludes being able to predict individual quantum events with specificity.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Does this mean a return to the theory that the Moon was scraped out of what's now the Pacific basin? IIRC, that was one of the earliest theories for its origin, sometime in the nineteenth century.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
I agree that as *you* practice it, astrology is not a pseudo-science as much as a non-science. Although I also suspect that you're very much in a minority among practioners and I also question the wisdom of using the term "astrology" at this point, considering the natural confusion that results.
I'd say that this puts is back at the question: as I'm interpreting what you're saying, the star charts are not themselves important, they're just a placebo-like medium that lets you sort out your own thoughts. So why bother with them? I'd wager that a decent councilor would be at least as effective, and there's no need hide behind the charts. (Actually, the comparison between the concilor and the astorloger would make a possible test, in this case. Although you'd need a large sample, considering the rather raty nature of the statistics you're bound to get.)
That's a pretty good summary, but people should know that Mars has two moons. However, they're not nearly as big as Earth's moon and are probably captured asteroids, not the result of a giant impact, so they don't invalidate this theory.
I also am not an astronomer, so this may be a dumb question, but how do you get an axis tilt of 177.36 degrees? Surely this is a tilt of 12.64 degrees. So do you use the magnetic poles as the reference; but in that case, when Earth switchs it's magnetic field, will all these axis tilts then be incorrect, or what if the other planets also have magnetic fields which switch?
The other alternative I see is on direction of rotation, but if that is the case, Venus also has an equator near the elliptic - just spinning in the opposite direction to us.
To be is to do - Descartes. To do is to be - Sartre. Dooby dooby do - Frank Sinatra.
Actually, as I was thinking about it, there might be some testable hypotheses in Astrology, but not along the lines of "this sign correlates with ..." because the charts are too complex for that (besides the moon and rising signs and relavent houses mean that one is likely to have a very good chance that individuals in the control group could have more influence from a given sign/house than those in the experimental group). I would liken this to a double blind study where over half of the people in the control group are given the medicine instead of a placebo.
Here are some hypotheses that might be worth taking a look at. Not sure how many of them would turn out:
1) It might be interesting to do statistical analysis on the number of hard (square, opposition) aspects and soft (trine, sextile) and the relative success of individuals in a number of areas (career, education, general sense of happiness). My guess is that counterintuitively, at the high end of the hard aspect ratios, people might be frustrated, while at the high end of soft/harmonious aspects, people might be lazy and unaccomplished.
2) It might be interesting to do a survey of 12th house/Pisces activity and people in the prison system. Unfortunately this analysis would be very complex as well and would probably need to be done in the following way:
Collect an experimental and control sample. Hand them to an astrologer. Have the astrologer rate the 12th house activity on a scale of 1 to 100. May require a compond scale: 12th house bodies, 12th house/ascendant interactions, house rulers, etc.
Do the statistical analysis.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Not that the LANGUAGE of science uses kilometers, meters and all that wonderful other metric stuff, right? Why do you think all basic science classes in US public education forces us to learn all those conversions from MM to CM to meters and beyond? Or was my boondocks of a school district just that far ahead?
I'm an American. Big deal if they use something other than Imperial measurements, scientists use metric (and the US should use metric for so many reasons, anyway). Go use Google, something of a query like "122KM to MPH" or "83M to FT"