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“Horoscoped” – A Meta Horoscope Made From The Most Common Words

David McCandless, Matt Hancock und Thomas Winningham von Information is Beautiful haben für ihr Projekt Horoscoped über 20.000 Horoskop-Vorhersagen auseinander genommen und diese in einer gewaltigen Meta-Horoskop-Visualisierung der häufigsten Wörter zusammen gefasst und somit wissenschaftlich ermittelt das es schlicht Bullshit ist.

How do you gather 22,000 horoscopes? Obviously you could manually cut and paste them from one of the many online Zodiac pages. But that, we calculated, would take about a week of solid work (84.44 hours). So we engaged the services of arch-coder Thomas Winnigham to do a bit of hacking.Yahoo Shine kindly archive their daily predictions in a simple and very hackable format (example). Thank you! So Thomas wrote a Python script to screen-scrape 22,186 horoscopes into a single massive spreadsheet. Screen-scraping is pulling the text off a website after it’s displayed. Python is a programming language. You can use it to write scripts that only gather the specific text you want. Then you run it multiple times so it mines an entire website.

Well, it’s not quite that easy. Big sites like Yahoo have ‘rate-limiting’ on their servers. That means if you access a page too many times too quickly, it thinks you’re a hacker and deploys all kinds of anti-hacking counter-measures. Initially, Thomas set his scraping speed too high (once every 10th of a second) and his IP got instantly banned from Yahoo for 24 hours. After some experimenting (and more bans), he found that a two second delay between scrapes prevented the defense mechanisms from kicking in. The script was set to run in the background (while we smoked cigars and discussed the empire). 12 hours later, we had our 22,000 horoscopes in a single file!

Der beste und wesentlich interessantere Part ist allerdings die allumfassende Meta-Horoskop-Vorhersage, die ich so unterschreibe, die aus allen analysierten Daten eine gemeinsame Vorhersage errechnet hat, die, für jedes Sternzeichen, bis ans Ende aller Tage gilt. Ready? Sure?

Weitere Infos über die analysierten Daten findet ihr auf dieser Projektseite. via waxy