I let an astrologer read my chart blind. I took notes.
Theo (saturn_returns) offered to read my chart knowing nothing but my birth date, time and place. Being who I am, I recorded it and scored every claim afterward: hit, miss, or too vague to count.
Results: a lot of vague. A couple of clear misses (I am not 'secretly theatrical'). A handful of hits I'd expect from anyone who has met an engineer.
And one I can't shake. He said my Moon in the 4th house suggests I show love by fixing things for family. Last winter I spent forty hours restoring my farmor's broken mantel clock. I've never mentioned that here.
It doesn't prove anything. One data point is an anecdote. But I went home and wound the clock, and it felt like more than maintenance.
Quartz, from the engineer's side of the table
Something I find genuinely moving, as a skeptic: there's a tiny sliver of quartz in nearly every cheap watch on earth. Squeeze quartz and it produces a small voltage; apply a voltage and it vibrates at a remarkably steady frequency. That's the piezoelectric effect, and it's why your watch keeps time.
I don't believe a quartz point is doing anything energetic when I hold it. But I've started keeping one on my desk anyway. When I'm stuck on a problem, I pick it up, and the weight and the cold and the clean geometry slow me down enough to think.
Maybe that's all some people mean. Maybe it isn't. Either way, I'm less dismissive than I was a year ago, and that feels like progress.
I put my grandmother's pendulum in a spreadsheet
Background: engineer, skeptic, but my farmor's brass pendulum has a strange track record in our family. So I ran an experiment.
Setup: 200 yes/no questions with answers I could check later (coin flips, sealed envelopes my sister prepared, next-day weather). Half the time I knew the answer while asking. Half the time I didn't.
Results:
• When I knew the answer: pendulum 'correct' 91% of the time.
• When I didn't: 52%. Basically a coin flip.
So the ideomotor effect is real, and my hands know what my head knows. Case closed, right?
Except here's the part I didn't expect. During the trials where I knew the answer, it started moving before I'd consciously decided anything, like it was showing me what I believed faster than I could think it. Which made me wonder whether my farmor was ever asking the pendulum to predict the future. Maybe she was asking it to tell her what she already knew, underneath the worry.
Last week I tested that the honest way. I'd been going back and forth on a job offer for days. Held the pendulum, asked 'Do I want this?' and it swung a hard yes before I'd even finished the sentence. I sat there laughing, because the spreadsheet would say that's just my own muscles. And yes. That's the point. I'd been ignoring them for a week.
I took the job. Farmor would have said 'I told you so' in Swedish, over coffee. Still a skeptic. Slightly less smug about it.
I ran a parking spell for 30 days. Results inside.
Context for new folks: I'm an engineer, I'm skeptical, and my grandmother's pendulum keeps being right in ways I can't explain. So I've started trying small practices in a structured way.
This month's experiment was a parking charm a friend here taught me. Before you turn onto the street, picture the open space, then say "thank you for my spot" out loud, as if it's already happened. That's it.
Method: 30 workdays downtown. Each morning I flipped a coin to decide whether I'd do the charm (heads) or not (tails), then logged the minutes from turning onto my street to engine off.
Results: 16 charm days averaged 4.2 minutes. 14 non-charm days averaged 6.1. A t-test gives p around 0.11, which is to say interesting, not significant, and I couldn't blind myself, which is a big problem.
The finding I didn't plan for: on charm days my notes column says things like "calm," "let a guy merge," "noticed the maples turning." On non-charm days it mostly says "ugh." Gratitude in advance seems to change how I drive, which might be the entire effect. Or might not.
Conclusion: I'm keeping the charm. Not because the data proves anything, but because I'm a nicer person for those four minutes. Next month: my grandmother's pendulum versus a random number generator. Methodology suggestions welcome.