How astrology paved the way for predictive analytics
If you type "Why are millennials" into Google, the top result completes the question with "obsessed with astrology". Never mind the answer; the question alone is likely to incite exasperation among scientists, most of whom would condemn astrology as pseudoscience at its most fatuous and infuriating. Astrology may have long been debunked - there is no reason to suppose that our fate is written in the stars - but it still endures, endorsed by countless trashy magazines and newspapers (and some supposedly serious ones), feeding off our own, self-absorbed vanity.
But the truth, however annoying, is that astrology played an important role in the history of science. Many of today's scientists might be embarrassed to acknowledge, for example, that the 17th-century German mathematician Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, also cast horoscopes for his boss, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.
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