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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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Astrology, like everything else from the 1970s except "The Godfather" movies (and maybe "Star Wars") is better left to the past.   It can't realy tell you anything at all about another person.

However, a study in the Journal of Politics last month says a mate's politics might tell you a lot, at least in regards to how well you will get along in the future, so forgot horoscopes or folk wisdom about opposites attracting - if you are holed up in a compound in Montana, you should find a mate who is a militant kook too, likewise if you are convinced your Prius is saving the environment, you should find someone who is also educated by advertising.
We've been skeptical of the Three Gorges Dam project for a number of years.   It isn't that dams are a bad idea, they are a great idea, it's just the the ecologists who endorsed the thing invented the absolutely perfect outcomes and assumed it would happen.
First, a cultural fact: The NFL Draft can be seen for three solid days by every cable subscriber in America.   This is hours and hours of nothing but 30 seconds of reading out a name punctuated by 14.5 minutes of nothing - actually, brief bursts of activity separated by committee meetings sounds a lot like most football games, but it consumed an entire network a short while ago even though the sport may not even be played this fall.

How is that relevant on a science site?
So Stephen Hawking doesn't believe in Heaven.  This is apparently a big deal.   It's not that he is wrong, he is most likely right, though the nature of faith is belief in defiance of any evidence so that doesn't matter, the important question is why anyone cares.
 
If your advocacy group says Republicans are anti-science but then Democrats are also anti-science, it may instead be that your groups positions aren't really scientifically valid.  Yet conservation groups routinely say "let science be the guide" as long as 'the science' is advocacy papers they fund and write.    If you don't agree, you are accused of being against science.
You'd think if you were adjusted to the horrors of war you'd be immune to concerns about seeing a therapist but some with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can't bring themselves to deal with it face-to-face.