Sunday, January 29, 2012

I gotta get serious about MySynastryEngine

Since football season ended for me 2 weeks early this year, it is now officially the off-season.  This means I need to find something else to do with my weekends and spare time besides working out, washing, cooking, eating, and sleeping.

Might be a good time for a date, right?  Sure, but I doubt that will be an every-night, or even every-weekend event this off-season.  Who knows... perhaps I speak too soon.  Since I have now officially been knighted THE sexiest bastard on God's Earth, I just might have a date every weekend this year.  After-all, dudes such as Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and George Clooney are unworthy to lick the sweat of my jockstrap now. I am far better than any of those three gentlemen, although I have to admit that in his younger days, Clooney was close.

All the more reason to chose wisely, which brings me to the subject of MySynastryEngine.  Every single day for the past year or so, I have visited sites such as Wikipedia, IMDB and IAFD looking up the birthdays of people I love and hate, feel attracted too, or am repulsed by.  My little black book has grown to well over 1,200 names and birthdays.   All of them have charts and records stashed in my Sirius 1.1 database.  Most of these folks can also be found in my Janus 4.3 database.

I have learned a lot about how the Sirius engine does things, and I am absolutely convinced that there are some serious mistakes in emphasis here.  Most of the points of emphasis do not match well with the sorts of things I read about classical synastry analysis.  I have learned a lot about the people in my black book, and just how and when Sirius 1.1 takes a left turn at Albuquerque.

To be precise, Sirius 1.1 places a heavy stress on the composite chart, or the relationship chart.  What is a composite chart?  A composite chart takes the position of your Sun and her Sun and averages them together.  If your sun is located at 1 degrees Taurus, and her sun is located at 28 degrees Virgo, you composite sun is located at (178 + 31) / 2 = 104.5 degrees, which is equal to 14.5 degrees Cancer.  You do this for every planet position in the chart.

So what the hell does this mean?  If you take a Taurus guy and average him with Virgo girl, you get an average Cancer tranny?  What the hell is that suppose to signify?  This point is a mathematical fact of quite dubious value.  I am skeptical that this tells us anything important.

Complicating the issue is the fact this tactic is a new innovation, just as is the Davison Relationship Chart.  This technique of averaging positions has not been used for even 100 years now.  I have serious doubts about any innovation that new.

Somehow, India has managed to have a very long and successful history of arranged marriages via a type of synastry analysis without either of these two techniques.  We're talking about 3,000 years of arranged marriages that actually work, and that were set-up on the basis of consequential synastry analysis.

Would we not be better served if we studied the way these match-makers work, and use their techniques?

I am convinced that the composite chart and the Davison Relationship charts introduce error, rather than clarifying facts about romance, sexual attraction, basic agreement levels, pleasantness and peace, etc.  Based on these two tools, the Sirius engine has generated a sizable number of false positives and false negatives.  A straight-elemental comparison of the first five (or personal) planets yields a far more accurate results... most of the time.

The rest comes from the House positioning of planets, just as the Janus 4.3 engine correctly emphasizes.  If Janus only had a numerical scoring system, it would be a better engine (today) than the one offered in Sirius.

My approach to writing a synastry engine WILL NOT be based on the composite chart or the Davison Relationship Chart.  I will do a straight elemental analysis of the first five (personal) planets.  My synastry engine will be based on sweet old-fashioned notions about soft aspects generating the best levels of over-all compatibility.  My engine will be loved in India, where the match-makers have a 3,000 year history of arranging actual marriages that are usually successful.

I could write and finish this engine in one week, if it were not for one little impediment:  I need to calculate the correct position of all the astronomical bodies.  Don't you use an ephemeris for that?  You can.  You can even find one here.  Translate that into you software DB if you can.

However, I have read many interesting cases made against the accuracy of these ephemera.  Many NASA-like folks say that the positions specified by these tables are inaccurate.  A precise location can only be obtained by grinding out the solution using the best current formulas.

Would it were that I only knew what those formulas were.  I really need to take a class in astronomy.  I need to find a sympathetic prof who can show me the formulas I need.  He or she can critique my implementation of these formulae in code.

Once this is done, I can grind out the rest of my solution in fairly short order.  The road-block is the accurate calculation of planetary position.  More than two years ago, my obsession with this project began with a simple and fun project to write some code that could calculate the position of the planets.  Now it looks like the project is coming around full-circle.  Where it all began is where it all comes back to right now.  I need to resume my original project.