How to read the newspaper
Seen elsewhere in a discussion of the ex-planet Pluto:
"Scorpios can be extremely explosive, and very direct, and this could be the trigger that makes them explode," says Milton Black, an Australian astrologer who claims to have more than 580,000 clients.
Well, we Geminis seldom explode, but we do have a nose for stercore tauri. I'm not going to argue for or against astrology, not at all; it was the phrase "more than 580 thousand clients" that made my nose itch fiercely.
Let's assume Mr. Black's knowledge and skills to be almost infinitely high - he is an Australian! - and say that it takes him only sixty seconds to prepare a horoscope for one client for an entire year (these must of course be individually prepared, because the position of the planets is different from year to year, and the ascendants and descendants from hour to hour and also according to the latitude where one was born).
Assuming nonetheless that Black can generate an annual horoscope in one single minute, he would need 9667 hours per year to outfit each of his clients with a horoscope. There are roughly 250 working days in a year. 9667 hours divided by 250 days equals 38.7 hours.
He needs to work 38.7 hours a day to prepare one-minute horoscopes for his clients. (Unless he takes no holidays and works through Christmas, New Year's Eve and his kids' birthdays, in which case he only needs to work 26.5 hours a day.)
Do you believe that Milton Black has more than 580 thousand clients?
posted by Udge @ 15:21
9 Comments:
You don't? :O
How cynical! Now, if he only takes clients born in Melbourne, say, he could do them in batches of apx. 66 at a time, doing everyone who had been born in roughly the same place at roughly the same hour. This would allow him to do his work in less than an hour per day! I think you owe Mr Black an apology, Udge.
Of course, his clients might be a little miffed to learn that they're having exactly the same lives and getting exactly the same advice as the 65 other people in their batch. But heck, he can afford to lose some business.
Dale, let's follow the example through, because I question your maths.
Following your assumption that all his clients were born in Melbourne (sure, why not), he would still need to consider year, day and hour to get the ascendants and descendants individually right. If we further assume that ninety percent of his clients (522 thousand) are between the ages of 25 and 45, that gives him 175,320 timepoints (year, day, hour) to consider. (This is on average 3.3 clients per time point, not 66.)
We assumed that 90 percent of his clients were born in this time frame, so the remaining 58,000 clients lie outside it. In total, he has to prepare horoscopes for 233,320 separate time points.
Granting him the near-superhuman ability to prepare an annual horoscope in one single minute, he needs 3889 hours to do the work. Divide that by a rough average of 250 working days per year, and we find that Mr. Black needs to work 15.6 hours every day simply to prepare the horoscopes. This is at least humanly possible compared to my original calculation, but I find it still (shall we say) extremely unlikely. When does he sharpen his pencils, or do his taxes, or answer the phone?
Seriously, though: the point is the word client which I believe he is egregiously misusing. I suspect that he means "my horoscope is printed in a newspaper with 580 thousand readers."
I would say that this is an entirely different thing: a client is a person with whom I have a direct, unmediated business relationship; this is clearly not the case with newspaper readers. I read the FAZ, Mercedes Benz advertises in the FAZ, am I a client of Mercedes?
I would not have objected had he called them "readers."
(Yes, I am avoiding a block of very unpleasant work that I should really be doing. How could you tell?)
Yes, you're right. (I was estimating in my head in the shower, and I probably misplaced a decimal somewhere.) A further problem for Mr Black is that (again by shower reckoning) nothing like 66 people per hour are born in Melbourne. It must be more like one or two. But does latitude figure in astrological computations? It might even be that you could throw in everyone born in the same hour in the same time zone.
However, I'm informed that a responsible astrologer spends a couple hours at least casting a horoscope, which way offsets any help that batching might give. Even if we could divide by 66, we would still have to multiply by 200 or so, giving the poor man, what? something like a 500 hour work-week. Makes working for Microsoft look like a breeze.
Okay, now we'e both better do some work ourselves :-)
I agree with you. If he means readers, he should say that. Client suggests that he is actually preparing charts for them, etc.
Hmm. I'll have to be careful around Beth. She is a Scorpio. I certainly hope she doesn't explode. That could be messy.
I know he isn't talking about spontaneous combustion but it's kind of fun to imagine. Unless it's Beth. That would be wrong.
I like to read the comics first, then the arts. I get any real news from the BBC online.
Ahem. Sorry, commenting on your title...
If he really is doing "proper" individualised horoscopes (and he may not even bother) then he'd only need to do them once per person (as you're only born once). So if he's been going for twenty years he could have spent 7.75 hours a day doing four-minute horoscopes. And I expect like every other astrologer he went over to computer-generated charts years ago so four minutes would be very adequate.
I'm sure you're right about him, but the figures don't quite work the way you suggested.
Well, DM beat me to the punch (see what happens when I get behind) and mentioned the Scorpio part of my personality.
The part that makes me laugh is the fact that Scorpios are going to be affected by the declassification of Pluto as a planet. It's not like the rock-formerly known as a planet isn't actually there anymore. It's still there! If you believe in astrogoly, the body of mass is still in the equation.
And 580,000 clients is insane. Unless he has one heck of a staff of people assisting him, I would imagine he meant readers.
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