Mike F.

With the help of fairy tales and entertainment companies like Disney, many people have some idea what a unicorn is. Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary says that a unicorn generally looks like a horse with a single horn on its forehead.[1] This agrees with popular fictional media, except this popular fiction tends to depict unicorns only as horses with single horns, instead of also allowing (e.g.) cloven hooves. In my definition, I’m siding with popular fiction and including only members of the genus Equus, whose only known living members are horses, zebras, and donkey relatives. None of these happen to have cloven hooves. (A genus is a level of taxonomy, a means of classifying living things. The traditional taxonomy levels – taxons – from top to bottom are: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.) Let nature genetically put a single horn on the head of any species of the genus Equus, and I would call it a unicorn. Continue reading “Could Unicorns Exist in Nature?”

From my layman point of view, astrology seems to be about making predictions in people’s lives, based on the positions of stars and planets. In various newspapers, I have seen astrological predictions called horoscopes. Using my date of birth, I can determine my particular Zodiac sign, which corresponds to one of the twelve Zodiac constellations. I can then read the prediction – typically covering the current or next day – for the group of people born in the same fraction of the year as that Zodiac sign. I also recall seeing posters for each sign of the Zodiac in one or more gift shops, supposedly telling what someone born under that sign is like and maybe what they might encounter in their life.

Many people regard astrology as just a bunch of superstitious nonsense. Is it? Continue reading “Astrology Ain’t So Bad, In Theory”