=+Task 10: I was interested in whether horoscopes are tosh. I recruited 1110 2201 people, made a note of their star sign (this variable, obviously, has 12 categories: Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio and Sagittarius) and whether they believed in horoscopes (this variable has two categories: believer or unbeliever). I sent them an identical horoscope about events in the next month, which read:

August is an exciting month for you. You will make friends with a tramp in the first week and cook him a cheese omelette. Curiosity is your greatest virtue, and in the second week, you’ll discover knowledge of a subject that you previously thought was boring.

Statistics perhaps. You might purchase a book around this time that guides you towards this knowledge. Your new wisdom leads to a change in career around the third week, when you ditch your current job and become an accountant. By the final week you find yourself free from the constraints of having friends, your boy/girlfriend has left you for a Russian ballet dancer with a glass eye, and you now spend your weekends doing loglinear analysis by hand with a pigeon called Hephzibah for company.