It’s 2008 — I think astrology has been dead for a few centuries. But OK, it’s been shown to be worthless again. A large study of thousands of “time twins” — people who were born at the same time — has concluded that there are no correspondence between them.

Researchers looked at more than 100 different characteristics, including occupation, anxiety levels, marital status, aggressiveness, sociability, IQ levels and ability in art, sport, mathematics and reading – all of which astrologers claim can be gauged from birth charts.

The scientists failed to find any evidence of similarities between the “time twins”, however. They reported in the current issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies: “The test conditions could hardly have been more conducive to success . . . but the results are uniformly negative.”

Big surprise.

Don’t look for astrology to vanish, though. Here’s the real surprise in the story.

Some of the most popular figures in the field, such as Russell Grant, Mystic Meg and Shelley von Strunckel, can earn £600,000 or more a year.

A single profitable astrology website can be worth as much as £50 million.

When the Daily Mail discovered that its expert on the zodiac, Jonathan Cainer, was about to leave the newspaper in 1999, it reportedly offered him a £1 million salary and a £1 million bonus to stay. He still preferred the offer at the Daily Express: no salary but all the money from his telephone lines.

Obviously, I’m in the wrong business. Maybe I need to start inserting the occasional horoscope reading in my blog posts.

Pisces: You will be busy exchanging ions across your gill membranes today — watch out for predators, and trust your lateral line organs.

Does everyone here listen to NPR or something? Not only have I been hearing all about the Expelled ads running, which is bad enough, but apparently in their attempts to sidle towards the lunatic side of the political spectrum, this morning they also ran a story about a pretentious 16 year old climate skeptic. Woo hoo, teenager thinks she knows more than scientific experts … now that is news. I took a look; I’m unimpressed, even considering her age. Parroting right-wing thinktanks is not evidence of independent, skeptical thought, I’m afraid.

Fortunately, James Hrynyshyn and Janet Stemwedel dug a little deeper. Both point out that the student’s exercise in critical thinking is a little shallow and a little selective. But of course shallow and selective is precisely what one wants in a young person being groomed to fit into the right wing ideology machine — someone just smart enough to snipe at the edges of the science, but not good enough to actually comprehend it.

If you’ve ever stopped to think that maybe there might just be something to phrenology, homeopathy, coffee enemas, etc., you should be reading Crap-Based Medicine. It’s for you.

It’s worth a try, and it certainly would stand out against the near-universal background of credulity on television. The makers of the Skeptoid podcast are putting together a pilot for a program on skepticism, with Phil Plait and Steven Novella in the cast. Let’s hope it makes it! Network executives — it’s something new and different, and it’s the kind of thing that might get me and people like me (you know, upscale, highly educated technophiles with some disposable income to spend on high-end luxury items) to turn on our TVs again.

There’s going to be a meeting of Skeptics in the Pub tomorrow, 7:00, at the Asgard on 350 Massachusetts Ave in Cambridge, starring Mike the Mad Biologist. You don’t want to miss it. He’s mad, you know.

This is Easter, the day Christians everywhere set aside to celebrate the day they were hoaxed by a gang of Middle Eastern charlatans into believing a local mystic rose from the dead. Zeno finds that this year it’s also a day to remember another flop: the cold fusion debacle.

It’s been 19 years since Pons and Fleischmann announced their purported discovery of a mechanism for generating energy from a room-temperature fusion cell. Unlike the resurrection, I was actually there for that one. I was a post-doc at the University of Utah at that time, in the building right next door to where Pons and Fleischmann worked, and I attended the various events associated with the “discovery”.

Even then, there was reason to doubt: I remember being mystified that they’d chosen to announce it via press release rather than a scientific publication (a strategy that you’ll notice the Discovery Institute has expanded upon), and when I attended Pons lecture on the phenomenon, I was bothered by the lack of mechanism and the uncontrollable variability in the experiments — it was basically a laundry list of experiments done, some of which did nothing, some that got a trickle of excess energy output, and others that exploded. It was exciting and interesting, and we all hoped that this was real, but it wasn’t science yet.

And it still isn’t. I guess some people are still puttering away at it, but it’s still an inconsistent phenomenological collection of anecdotes.

If only Pons and Fleischmann had thought to make a religion of it, that wouldn’t be a problem.

Who needs church if you can get together and reason together? First it was Boston; now other cities are joining in with gatherings of fans of skepticism and science. Here are your opportunities:

London, England: Saturday, 15 March, 7:00pm, at the Doric Ach near Euston station.

Anchorage, Alaska: Thursday, 20 March, 7:00pm, at the cafe in the Barnes and Noble on Northern Lights Blvd.

We shall take over!

I’m the wrong person to scrutinize this one, but maybe some bored physicist out there can tell us someting about this book, Our Undiscovered Universe, which claims to describe a new version of physics called “Null Physics”.

Let me know if there’s anything there.