When it comes to modeling real-life phenomena for astrological research, earthquakes are one of the most widely studied.

And why not? After all, the exact time, place, and day are known as well as the strength of the effect (in magnitude).

However, a mapping of earthquake strength to solar system events has proven to be elusive, not to be dramatic, but until now.

Inspired by this Kaggle post, I decided to try my hand at this perhaps age-old problem, and I found that yes, earthquake magnitude correlates with the moon phase at the time of the event. (Moon phase has been looked at quite often but not with the model I will present today.)

First off, I went to https://earthquake.usgs.gov for the earthquake data. (Thanks to Joe Ritrovato for the link.)

​I wanted to look particularly at all earthquakes of any depth between Jan 1, 1975 and Jan 1, 2005. Those years were chosen, because a uniform seismograph was finally used through out the world by the mid-1970's, and hydraulic fracturing with its associated quakes was not yet in widespread practice. The search was further restricted to earthquakes of magnitude greater than 5.5, following this system of what counts as a serious earthquake. (Some lower limit to the magnitudes was necessitated by the search limit on the USGS site.)

Here is what my search looked like (be sure to also choose earthquakes only below the fold):

And here is what you will see if you press enter:

By reading the book Cymatics, many of us thrilled to the idea of vibration made visible in that gem of a book from the late 1960's. 

With a few lines of code I have decided to plot the equations which go to heart of, and could be said to generate, these beautiful forms.

More motivated me than just the chance to look directly at and witness the imagery. I have seen some claims that the Shri Chakra could be seen from these "tonoscopes".

This is really easy! The walnuts and rosemary are said to be so good for the brain, and after eating this, it sure feels that way!

Ingredients (all organic):
1 medium-large butternut squash
4 - 6 oz. goat cheese
2 - 3 oz whole walnuts
1/2 - 1 oz rosemary sprigs
3 to 6 tbsp. ghee
1/2 lb. of dates

Preheat oven to 395 degrees.

Slice off the ends  of the cleaned squash. Then, slice the squash in two longways, and then for each half generated, slice in half again.

Clean out seeds and strings. You may want to save them. (See postscript.)

Arrange the squash pieces in a baking dish. Dollop the ghee on them. Align the rosemary sprigs on top. In the sides of the dish, add walnuts.

Bake for 45 to 55 minutes in the oven. While it is baking, de-pit the dates and crumble or cube the goat cheese.

After the 45 to 55 minutes of initial baking, pull the squash pan out and add the dates and cheese. Return to the oven for 5 minutes only to melt the cheese, or you can just let the dates and cheese stay firm without this last melt.

Serve!

P.S. You can toast or bake the squash seeds and extra walnuts separately with a bit of ghee and salt and pepper for 10 minutes for a fun snack for the next day or as part of hors d'oeuvres for this meal.

Astrological research is presently a tough row to hoe.

There is no money in it, and my clients actually don’t like it.

​They ask me why I do it. These are intelligent well-educated people, but they tell me they come to astrology because they are sick of science. ("One year coffee is good for you, one year it is bad for you…")

The work of astrological science is lonely, scary, and frustrating and really tough on me physically.

I do it instead out of love, out of passion, out of honestly wanting to know the answer.

That is why I say it is a hobby for me. I think that is a good thing.

I went to college full-time at fifteen, actually being able to emancipate based on my scholarship stipend. Some of my friends were getting PhDs at that age from schools like Harvard and Princeton.

One thing united us in order to work so hard and give up so much, so young. We all shared an immense personal love for science, actually being in love with Mother Nature Herself.

Then, 5 or 10 years later, we all made it into the profession, the industry, of science, and we almost all dropped out.

Research into fundamental astrology returns my gaze back to Mother Nature, and it is that worship which is really why I do it, and yet I certainly do keep all the numbers real. You must, to get really close to Her.

So, even though I do a particular methodological approach which is very big data and AI oriented, using pretty advanced mathematics, I do it for intensely personal reasons, and actually as an artistic expression, I feel. 

The methodologies that I would like to see at large in the future of astrology research would be ones that would speak to our fact-based culture as a whole, and maybe along the way, some money could be sent toward astrological researchers, because a need of society at large is met, some pressing practical societal need is answered.

Richard Feynman once said: “People who wish to analyse nature without using mathematics must settle for a reduced understanding.”

So, I think we have to increase our mathematics chops, even if we are doing hermeneutics, perhaps learning from all the good work happening in the digital humanities in the past decade.

We also have an opportunity to go beyond what even regular science provides society, and that is to do our work with love, for love.

It is not just an opportunity, it is a necessity, for astrology is and we are psychology and medicine and football games and politics and money and families, everything altogether, and that is love. I know it is.

Remarks prepared for The Kepler Conference, 2017.

Click on image to see the presentation from The Kepler Conference for Astrological Research, Jan 2017.

[Edit: a crazy further reduction in RMSE was achieved by finally using a neural net. The quick write-up of that can be seen here.

A full journal article was just approved for publication (March 2018). It will be referenced in the bibliography.]

To hear the audio of the misspellings, download the original file below and mouse over on the second red graph.

For those who might have missed it, here is a copy of my remarks at the successful bending spoons event today at the joint Parapsychological Association  and Society for Scientific Exploration conference held here in Boulder. I twisted the fork during my demonstration.

Presented at the Society for Scientific Exploration 2016 summer conference here in Boulder, Colorado.

A few weeks ago, I did an interview with the lovely Kanyakumari Ayurveda school.

A student read the interview and asked a very good question of her own:

Funny that you mention in the interview that as a teenager, astrology seemed embarrassing. I wonder when such sentiment started building? This reminded me of my classmate's comment. He is an Ivy league graduate who's not doing very well in life. He said "Astrology is too unscientific to me." My inside caption answer to that was "That's why you missed out on 3 big startup exit opportunities." My personal suspicion is that 1) on the surface, industrialization called for humans who just do what they are told, so the ruling class assigned prestige on things that push people further away from success like institutionalized education 2) or, more importantly, there was a cosmic change at some point (perhaps French revolution? End of feudalism?) that somehow pushed certain souls into higher state of consciousness and certain others into "employee" state of mind, to make the industrialization possible to begin with. I think something like this happened again when startup bubble started (division of super smart who use every wisdom passed down to mankind and super dumb thinking institutionalized "knowledge" enlighten them - like myself getting an MBA for a high price). What do you think cause that embarrssement in your young self?

Here is my answer:

Ah, that is a really cool question. I would say it is a bit of both. (Note the rise of the industrialist illuminati with the "Age of Reason".) The best politicians, religionists, industrialists, and businesspeople always​ have used astrology.

The separation of the "everyday people" from astrology probably did occur around the end of feudalism with the rise of industrialism and "Reason".

​My recent ancestors came from a time/space that was still somewhat feudal (early 1900's rural Slovakia, the last place in Europe to get Christianity fully and still not a "Reasonable" place), and the occult was and continues to be quite active in these communities.

​Even in the USA, where far-Eastern Europeans formed very strong communities, such as the pocket of Western PA in which I grew up, there is a deep abiding respect for and use of herbs, organic/biodynamic farming, astrology, and magic.

Remember that the library of the Vatican is covered with a beautiful astrology mural. It and others like it are all dated to 16th Century, an apex of astrological influence from right before the Age of Reason. Perhaps the installation of the separation of the everyday people from astrology  is a result of this apex of astrology, a kind of great peaking awareness of the ​power​ of astrology and a development of a long game of maximizing its power by the most resourced people. Industrialism also took everyday people away from the lessons of wild land and Nature, including the hidden lessons.

​I kind of consider myself one of the first Millennials, so to speak, where, 20 years ahead of the curve, I dropped academia for something much more cool, difficult, and truly worthwhile. As such, I have done things for reasons that I consider ancient: is it true? is it beautiful? is it eternal?  As a teenager, I shied away from astrology simply with a teenager's keen sense of the social: my friends were all science geeks like myself and I wanted to join the whole lot of them in conversation and not stick out.

It is only when we grew up, literally and metaphorically, did their and my respect for, and language and understanding of, these hidden spaces such as astrology grow and develop too. 

Also, how my parents did astrology seemed more about the immediate, the material. The truth, beauty, and eternity of Vedic astrology was not yet shown  to me. And theoretical science as a  field did show those traits to me. I am grateful for that knowledge now for their practical aspects and am only sad for the years of yearning, for the chasm in my life when science was all I had before Vedic astrology appeared, but as a friend points out, without that time, I would not be where I am today.

In a similar way, I am not angry at the Illuminati and the industrialists, et al. ​When astrology has a full comeback, it will be all the sweeter for having been tested.

Offered through Ayurved Sadhana Vidyalaya for a group that is both online and in-person.

We are only a week into each. (They are separate courses.)

There are full past recordings of each.

See http://ayurvedsadhana.com/sanskrit-and-jyotish/ for more.