Horror scoped

The wonderful website Information is Beautiful does terrific work taking interesting data and turning into easy-to-grasp information. They recently turned their attention to astrology — guess why — and did something truly cool: made a word cloud of the most commonly used terms in horoscopes. The sample was pretty big, comprising 22,000 horoscopes taken from Yahoo (which itself got them from astrology.com). Here’s what they found:

Heh. Note that the common words appear over and over again in all the horoscopes despite the sign. Feel, keep, life, sure, energy, better, and of course love… you see these in all the signs. Why, it’s almost as if the signs make no difference!

And what I found more interesting is what you don’t see: words with significantly different descriptive power. If different signs tend to describe different personalities, why don’t I see unique words like angry, powerful, extroverted, introverted, and so on? They scraped the most commonly used unique words for every sign, and they’re really not very predictive (scroll down to the Word Analysis 2 section on the Information Is Beautiful page to see). Again, it’s ...

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