DR70 – A dedicated machine for astrologers | Hacker News Reader

DR70 – A dedicated machine for astrologers

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57 pointssohkamyung18 comments

There are also circuit diagrams for 'e-meters' ... presumably targeted at a similar crowd.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/E-Meter/

Haha, these kind of quack science devices really annoy me.

Looking on eBay, there's some e-meters for £300. I'm sure a £3 multimeter would do a better job of measuring resistance ;)

I'm really curious as to whether the people that produce/sell these things, know they're crap, or whether they believe they work.

In a slightly similar vein - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/nov/14/bad-sc...

(A bomb detector, which is basically a glorified dowsing rod)

There's a very good star-chart program that's been around for many years, called Astrolog [0].

Although it's obviously intended for astrologers, you don't have to believe in astrology to find it useful. Maybe you just want to know whether that bright light near the moon is Venus or Jupiter, or when is the next time Mars will be easily visible.

[0] http://www.astrolog.org/astrolog.htm

I was always a bit puzzled by the ubiquity of astrology and other superstition in old scifi (PKD, Heinlein to name a few), but I guess if even Reagan used things like this that explains where the trope came from.

There was in the US, in about the early 80's I think, a sort of mass abandonment of telekinesis/ESP/astrology/ghosts...all sorts of stuff.

Part of it may have come from the same rise in evangelical political engagement as the Republican party weaponized them, definitely some of it was a push back against the perceived failure of Hippy culture.

Very curious find! I wonder what sort of calculations it's doing. Anything that would be useful to an astronomer? Or just weird bunko? Are the calculations deterministic?

There's a great book called Practical Astronomy with your Calculator; I wonder what the astrological analog would be.

Since Astrology is bunk, it might be interesting just to see what they're doing/claiming with this.

It's very unlikely astrologers have created or added anything that's useful or applicable to astronomy. It's more likely that they've taking things astronomers have discovered and used and worked that into their quackery to make slicker quackery.

I think it would be interesting if it was like a special-purpose calculator for astronomy, that happened to have pointless astrology window dressing.

I also think it would be interesting, albeit in a totally different way, to know what "algorithms" they're up to in there, even though it's bullshit.

Definitely agree about their quackery.

Astronomy now is a science, but historically there wasn't any distinction and much astronometry (measurements of the sky) was done to increase the accuracy of the predictions.

It could well be they are doing epicycles caculations to determine stellar positions etc

Right: Astronomy is astrology which advanced beyond the pre-scientific mindset, and made progress, as opposed to stagnating. We can see similar progressions in the medical world, and we can see that one thing holds true: The scientific version of the field became useful to society as a whole, whereas the non-scientific one remains only useful to the practitioners, and then only to the extent they charge for their services.

Greater minds than yours esteemed astrology as the "noble art" - Claudius Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe, John Dee and Carl Jung to name a few. Have you actually studied astrology beyond newspaper sun signs? If not, you're not in a position to dismiss it.

Interestingly, astrologers have made significant contributions to the history of timekeeping. Since they really care about clock changes, time zones, mean solar time, and exactly when these things took effect, they've done a lot of good helping us better document that history. (It shows up in the Unix TZ project)

The calculations are deterministic. I happen to know how astrologers work, and why people still believe them.

You run the algorithm using the exact time and place of client's birth. This is, of course, bullshit — some random predictions, which are deliberately written in quite ambiguous, but somewhat flattering style (the genre was perfected in hundreds of years). But now, the most interesting part comes to play.

You tell the client one or two predictions from the list, starting from the most vague and/or flattering (like "you are probably going through worse times than you deserve"), and observe the reaction. If it is positive, you probe the next close thing from the generated set, and so on. If you are good in reading people and adjusting your response according to body language feedback, you can generate the set of predictions or advices so accurate you will impress even yourself, even if you don't believe any of the astrological bullshit. Most astrologers don't.

Nice to know the (ex-) leader of the most powerful military machine and protagonist in the cold war used this to make 'better' decisions.

I once was hired on basis of my "Uranus in Mercury"... I declined instantly. But it's a job, I can not imagine living under astrology based decision making government, that's nightmare realization

> This is the same Digicomp which made two mechanical "computer" models, or toys

I doubt it is the same company. Those toys were made by E.S.R., Inc., whereas the DR70 is by Digicomp Research Corporation, which apparently still exists. A cursory search didn't reveal any connection between the companies.

I wonder which key switches it uses.

Microswitch, no doubt, from the looks of it. The best key mechanisms ever made. (Think MIT AI/LISPM keyboards.)

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