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Updated 59 Days ago
Proof That Horoscopes Are Bogus
I'm about to let you in on a little secret; horoscopes aren't real. I'm not talking about whether or not you can relate them to your life, because many of them are so general that you could apply them to anything if you're really determined to. But if you are someone who lives their life according to what is "predicted" for you on a daily basis, stop right how because you are wasting your time.
How do I know this? I personally wrote six months worth of horoscopes when I interned at a magazine in college. I had friends in college who penned these astrological predictions for publications too, and trust me, a knowledge of the constellations wasn't a requirement to write them. Sometimes, when I had two longer horoscopes next to each other, I would copy and paste them around to mix it up a little bit. What does this mean for you? Well, somewhere at a little desk, an average intern or student is randomly predicting your future based on what they happen to be thinking of at that moment.
Just in case you don't believe me, I've taken the liberty of writing everyone's weekly horoscope for them today. Enjoy!
Libra (September 22-October 21) You are lucky this week because some no-name stars are lined up or something. Ask your boss for a raise. If they say no, it's because they want to see if you're tough-as-nails, so slap them around a bit until they agree to a bigger paycheck.
Scorpio (October 22-November 20) The moons are not in your favor this week. October 9 will be especially unlucky, so you should stay in bed all day after calling in sick to work.
Sagittarius (November 21-December 20) Your lucky days are Wednesday and Friday this week, so on those two days, my sources are telling me to tell you to buy as many lottery tickets as possible. You'll probably win the lottery.
Capricorn (December 21-January 19) The stars have aligned so that you have extra energy this week. Sign up to run a full marathon this coming weekend, and don't worry if you haven't exactly trained for it. They have excellent medical aid on site.
Aquarius (January 20-February 18) You are feeling very fast this week, but you might get yourself into trouble here. Keep speed limits in mind if you don't want a repeat of last month...
Pisces (February 19-March 19) The moons of Uranus have lined up to make you lucky in love. If there's someone you've had a crush on for a while, now is the time to make your move. Show up with flowers and a hand-penned song of adoration. They're sure to profess their love back.
Aries (March 20-April 18) This is going to be the best week of the year for you. You'll get a raise, make new friends, go on an amazing date, win a new car and win an award for being so amazing. (This may or may not be my sign.)
Taurus (April 19-May 19) I'm not getting much of a feeling about you. Maybe you should try making a friend or two this week.
Gemini (May 20-June 19) You'll find new courage this week because our moon has lined up with Saturn. Do something you've always been scared to try, like sky-diving, mountain climbing or mud wrestling with alligators.
Cancer (June 20-July 21) You're feeling very pensive this week because your stars ran into the big dipper. Spend some time at home in the dark in your footie pajamas eating ice cream out of the carton. Listen to old Cher albums for an added bonus.
Leo (July 23-August 21) See Capricorn.
Virgo (August 22-September 21) A solar eclipse in Leo on Thursday will motivate you to make a fresh start. Quit your job, sell your house and take a couple years to tour the North American Continent.
About The Author:
I just moved back to The Lou from CoMo and I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me an idea/comment/bored rambling at audrey@toastedrav.com.I am also an expert at the Chicken Dance, and I am willing to give lessons for a small fee.
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What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.