Classical Jyotisha makes dated claims about a life. We have encoded them, we compute them, and we have published in advance what would prove us wrong.
Read a weather forecast and you know exactly what you are holding: a statement about what is likely, made by a method whose track record can be checked, which you are free to ignore. Meteorology is where rigorous forecast verification was invented — the discipline of scoring a prediction against what actually happened, and publishing the score.
That is the shape we want for this. Here is what the tradition says. Here is how well it has held up when it was tested. What you do with it is yours.
What is actually new here
We wrote down what would change our minds, before we looked.
Every astrology service says its readings are accurate. None of them can show you the test. We think that is the whole problem, so we did the opposite thing first: a pre-registered specification, frozen and timestamped, that states the hypotheses, the statistical tests, and — in its own section — what result we would accept as a refutation. We committed to publishing the outcome either way, including a null one, and we expect a null one.
The published literature on astrological validity is almost entirely negative. Carlson in Nature in 1985 was null. Dean and Kelly's 2,100 "time twins" in 2003 were null. The Gauquelin Mars effect did not replicate. We treat the prior probability of a large predictive effect as low, and we designed the studies so their main deliverables survive a null result: an executable, source-cited formalisation of the rules, a measurement of how often the tradition contradicts itself, and a validated chart engine, which we have committed to publishing as open source when the results are published.
Three times a figure of ours turned out to be measuring us
This is not a hypothetical risk and we are not going to be coy about it. Three times a number we reported turned out to be measuring our own encoding rather than the texts. The worst of them arrived looking like a confirmed hypothesis at p = 0.0004; the effect vanished when we removed pairs that our own chapter structure had made mutually exclusive, and on a later pass its sign flipped while the p-value stayed impressive. That hypothesis is now suspended as uncomputable on our corpus, and it is suspended in public.
Each time, the fix was the same and it is the habit the product is built on: where a quantity is our choice rather than the tradition's, it is declared in the data — not in a footnote — and the tests refuse to let the figure be quoted without the declaration travelling with it.
Counted from the repository at build time
What has been built
Not one number on this page was typed in by hand. Each was counted out of the project's own files when the page was built, and each says underneath it how it was counted.
And the figures that do us no favours
These are the same size as the ones above, in the same list format, for a reason. A page that shows you the flattering counts and buries the rest has told you nothing you can use.
On the register of the material
The dasa-phala chapters are not wellness literature. They speak of disease, loss, imprisonment and death alongside gain and honour, and where we show you what they say we show it in the schema's own words rather than in softer ones. We have not decided how plainly to put the adverse material in the product, and we would rather say that than pretend the question does not exist.
Three complete reports, nothing withheld
See what you would actually get.
Anyone can show you a chart wheel. These are the whole thing: both squares, every planetary position, the Vimshottari dasa with the bhuktis opening underneath each period, what the encoded classical rules say in two columns, the combinations that matched, and the thirteen strength scores with each one's rank against a hundred thousand synthetic charts.
Then there is a toggle, and behind it the figures the first half was built from: the six Shadbala components per planet, every rule that matched with its source and its standing, the combinations that were never tested with the reason code for each, the four readings of the two open textual questions, and the provenance of every parameter in the scores. Nobody else shows you what produced the number.
All three births are invented. No real person's birth details appear anywhere on this site.
Two minutes
What this is, out loud.
The video loads only when you press play, and it is served from this site. There is no embedded player, so no third party is told you visited this page or that you pressed it. The still image above is a file on this site too.
What a forecast is for
You can ignore it, act against it, or act with it.
A forecast is useful, checkable and non-fatalistic all at once. That is why we keep coming back to the comparison. Nobody thinks a rain forecast decides whether it rains, and nobody thinks reading one is pointless either.
So we will tell you what the tradition says about a period of your life, where that reading came from, and how well this kind of claim has held up when tested. We will not tell you that acting on it improves how the period goes. Whether a forecast carries information and whether acting on it helps are two different claims, and our studies test only the first. We have no evidence for the second and we are not going to imply we do.
Not built yet, and the reason is not engineering
Telling us how a period actually went — before we tell you anything.
The Vimshottari dasa divides a life into periods, and the classical chapters say what each one brings. The obvious product is to show you that. The useful one is the other way round.
So: the periods appear with no direction, no colour and no count. You say how each one actually went, on its own terms. Only then does the text's reading appear, and the page records that you answered first — permanently, so an answer given afterwards can never be counted as a blind one. Nobody is ever asked whether they agree with the reading. That question measures the reading.
Then we can publish how often the two match, on real lives, with the method fixed in advance. That is the number this whole project exists to produce, and nobody has it.
It is off because of what it asks of you, not because it is unfinished. Marking four periods in a row as difficult is writing down a decade of your life going badly, and the chapters you would be answering against speak of disease, loss and death. The consent wording for that is drafted and not approved, and it stays off until it is.
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Planets & Me is not open yet. Leave an email address and we will write to you once when it is.
What we collect here, exactly.
- Your email address, because we cannot write to you without it.
- Nothing else. No name, no date of birth, no time of birth, no place. There is no field on this page for any of them.
It is stored in our own database in Mumbai and used for one thing: telling you when Planets & Me opens. We do not sell it, we do not share it, and we have no analytics on this page — so we do not know you read this far. The whole privacy notice says what else is kept and for how long.
Said plainly, once
What we are not claiming.
We have no verified citations. Not one of the citation markers in the rule library has been checked against a printed edition yet; that pass is underway and it is not finished, and until it is, an attribution here is where we believe a claim comes from rather than where we have confirmed it does.
We are not claiming our predictions beat anyone else's — that is unverifiable and everybody says it. We are not claiming that following a reading improves an outcome. We have no testimonials, no user count and no press, because the product has not opened and inventing any of those would cost us the only thing we actually have.
The specification is still a draft and the studies are not finished. This is the state of the work, as of today.