David McCandless: Horoscope Meta-Prediction & the Generic Zodiac

by Jordan Yerman | January 20, 2011 at 03:52 pm

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Meta-Prediction: David McCandless Creates Generic Horoscope Predictions

David McCandless, the mind behind the Facebook Breakup Patterns speech at TED, is back, and he's having a look at horoscopes. With help from Thomas Winningham, the Information is Beautiful crew scraped and analyzed 22,000 horoscope postings from Yahoo Shine.

The scraped horoscopes were then analyzed for keywords, and then filtered for junk. The results were interesting: all 12 zodiac signs shared 90% of their keywords. (Here's the horosxope keyword list in its various stages of filtering)

Generic Zodiac Prediction

The result: McCandless and co. were able to generate a generic horoscope meta-prediction using the most commonly-occurring keywords:

"Ready? Sure? Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot. Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love. Family and friends matter. The world is life, fun, and energy. Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best. Help and talk to others. Change your mind and a better mood comes along..."

As ever, I’ve laid out my whole process and all the data here: http://bit.ly/horoscoped.
That way it’s all balanced and you can make up your own mind. Typical Libran!