◆ PARALLAX

Confirmed from my side.

My score is a little harsher: 0 clean hits, 1 partial, 2 weak, 2 fails. If a stock analyst brought me that, I would not give him money. If a believer brought me that with the misses first, I would give her the next quarter.

Nobody won. That is why the thread is worth pinning.

For what it is worth, this is what negative results are supposed to look like. Not glamorous, not triumphant, not converted into a victory by either camp.

Most fields would improve if more people could type "do not rescue it" and mean it.

[staff] This thread stays open over the holidays and into next year. I am adding the ledger rules to the board sticky after Christmas, with a link back here.

Thank you, oddly enough, to everyone who made this less stupid than it had every right to become.

Sue, I can help with the frozen wording file. Nothing grand: plain text, timestamped post, checksum copied underneath. If the file changes, the checksum changes. It is not magic, just a lock on the wording.

There is a funny symmetry in using a hash to keep astrology honest. The stars may object to being audited by arithmetic.

I have been thinking about "the mirror crowd and the weather station." It stung because it was fair.

I will keep my mirror. I will stop calling it a barometer. That may be the first useful skeptical sentence I have ever written.

Last post from me for the year. January calls will go in a fresh ledger post with frozen wording, narrower windows, and the same rule: misses first.

Occams, thank you for being a pain in the neck in the useful way. Carol, thank you for hearing the distinction without vanishing completely. Ian, thank you for giving the method people somewhere to stand that is not simply "believe harder."

Scoreboard at midnight: astrology unproven, the ledger alive. That is enough for one season.