blog@Yantrajaal

In the evolutionary ascent of man, the idea of time is perhaps the first concept that differentiates him from his animal past. Unlike a human being, an animal, say a cow, has no -- or very rudimentary -- memories of the past, and certainly no hopes and plans for the future. It lives in the perennial present and is motivated only by the current state of its environment and its own current state of hunger, fear, libido or discomfort. Time is also an enigmatic concept that defies definition. Trapped in a peculiar case of circular logic, where “the snake swallows its tail”, we say that “Time is what is measured by clocks and a clock is what measures time”.  We obviously sense the passage of time but this flow is another mystery because if it indeed flows, like the water of a river, then what exactly are the banks of the river that it flows through? Then again, do we sit still while time flows past us? Or do we move along through stagnant time? There have been questions galore but hard...

Every morning, when the sun rises, birds wake up and start chirping. We are not surprised because we see a very clear connection between a cause, the increase in ambient light, and the effect it has in waking up the birds. But when the sun rises, the Ispat Express moves out from Howrah station as well. Even in this case we are not surprised even though there is no obvious connection between the ambient light and behaviour of the engine. We explain the first phenomenon through causation and the second through correlation. Perhaps if we look very hard we might find a causative mechanism that explains why the Ispat Express departs at the crack of dawn and not at any other time, but frankly that is of little interest to the passenger. We are happy with the correlation, we are not really bothered about the causation. That is the crux of this article where we explore astrology from the perspective of data science and machine learning. Traditional scientists would of course hesitate to view...