Uranus in Pisces and “Ubiquitous Computing”

February 20, 2011 By

Ubiquitous computingI read an article the other day that mentioned  ”ubiquitous computing” which resonates so clearly of the mutual reception between Uranus in Pisces and Neptune in Aquarius that I had to do a little more research.  We call this “mutual reception” because both Uranus and Neptune are in the signs that is ruled by the other – Uranus in Pisces, ruled by Neptune, and Neptune in Aquarius, ruled by Uranus.  Mutual reception intensifies the strength of the astrological influence, which in this case combines the blurring of the boundaries that Neptune/Pisces inspires with the technological detachment of Uranus/Aquarius. (See these links for other articles on the subject.)

Neptune entered Aquarius in 1998, and Uranus entered Pisces in 2002.  Both planets change signs this year, but there’s no disputing the fact that the mutual reception between these two planets have created the sense that computing and living with electronic screens is absolutely ubiquitous.

Although the actual expression “ubiquitous computing” was first coined in 1988, we could argue that the idea became a reality with the release of the Iphone.  In an interesting astrological timing, Steve Jobs announced in 2003, with Uranus having just entered Pisces, that cellphones would become important instruments for computer access, and subsequently announced the Iphone launch in 2007.

The notion of “ubiquitous computing” has become a field of study in itself,  Financial giant Citi’s representative said, ”Ubiquitous computing is about embedding computing into our daily lives, it is social, cross platform, cross device, cross OS by default. Today, email is ubiquitous and social graph-based apps are also ubiquitous. “ According to Wikipedia 27 countries currently host research centers in the field.

Now that Uranus is moving into Aries and Neptune into Pisces, it will be interesting to see what the field of computing will bring us.  Warfare (Aries) through technology (Uranus), certainly, but I suspect we are on a New Frontier (Aries) as well.  Neptune moving into Pisces will offer its own challenges, which we will be discussing this week here at Astrological Musings.

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The human brain and robotics: One step closer to Transhumanism

April 14, 2009 By

Researchers from Honda Motor Company have developed a new way to analyze human brain patterns and translate them into commands for their new generation of robots.  Several years ago I predicted that in the Age of Aquarius, at which we are on the brink, the distinction between the human brain and technology will be blurred, and computers will plug into our brains directly and pick up our thoughts.

Other research is beginning to show that the use of technology is changing the human brain as we adapt to the new demands of our changing world. As I wrote in this earlier article:

Since Neptune entered Aquarius in the late 1990s following the Uranus/Neptune conjunction of 1992-1995, the boundaries between humans and technology (Uranus/Aquarius) have blurred (Neptune).  When Uranus entered Pisces in 2003, instigating the mutual reception that has been in place since then with Uranus in the sign ruled by Neptune and Neptune in the sign ruled by Uranus, this blurring has increased exponentially.  So really, for the last 15 years we have been wandering into uncharted technological territory.  This period saw the explosion of the internet and the wiring of nearly every human being on the planet into the World Wide Web.

This hard-wiring of technology into our brains comes easier for those of us who are already rather electric in nature, with Uranus strong in our charts.  For others it’s a more difficult

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Digital Astrology: What kind of tech user are you?

March 30, 2009 By

smartphonePC World brings us this interesting report from the Pew Research Center on the different types of tech users and suggests that perhaps there’s an astrological connection:

With all the various forms of smartphones and laptops entering our lives, it sometimes seems like the Internet is becoming a part of us: The connection is always on, and information is always just a click away. It turns out, though, the majority of Americans don’t feel that mobile electronics are tethering them to the digital world — in fact, most adults see the devices as being distant and unimportant parts of their lives.

A new report by the Pew Research Center attempts to categorize people into 10 different types of tech users. You could call it a kind of astrology for the digital age: a set of memorably named designations that tell you your preferences and personality when it comes to the electronic world. (Sorry — no “heavenly bodies” involved in this pseudo-science.

OK, there’s only ten categories, but if we get creative we can come up with sign correlations:  Remember that each of our charts is made up of many different sign combinations, so this is for entertainment purposes only!

Digital Collaborators: 8% of adults use information gadgets to collaborate with others and share their creativity with the world. These are the Libras – the ones for whom relationships and connections are critical, and probably also the Leos who feel that everything they do is important enough to be shared with the greater universe.

Ambivalent Networkers: 7% of adults heavily use mobile devices to connect with others and entertain themselves, but they don’t always like it when the cell phone rings.  It would be Aries and Scorpio, the Mars-ruled signs, that like to control when and how electronic communication takes place.

Media Movers: 7% of adults use online access to seek out information nuggets, and these nuggets make their way through these users’ social networks via desktop and mobile access.  This would be Gemini – the adept processors of information.

Roving Nodes: 9% of adults use their mobile devices to connect with others and share information with them.  This would be Capricorn, ruled by Saturn for which technology is primarily for practical uses

Mobile Newbies: 8% of adults lack robust access to the internet, but they like their cell phones. Our Taurus friends are usually the last to jump on a fad bandwagon.  They are just discovering cellphones but find the rest of it just silly.

Desktop Veterans: 13% of adults are dedicated to wireline access to digital information, and like how it opens up the pipeline to information for them.  The Virgos among us are practical and find browsing the internet on a phone far less practical than the desktop computer.

Drifting Surfers: 14% of adults are light users – despite having a lot of ICTs – and say they could do without modern gadgets and services.  These are the Sagittarians who would far rather be outdoors having adventures and meeting real people that browsing the internet on their cellphones.

Information Encumbered: 10% of adults feel overwhelmed by information and inadequate to troubleshoot modern ICTs.  This would be our Pisces friends, who find it easy to get lost in the barrage of information technology and the need to continually update their products.

The Tech Indifferent: 10% of adults are unenthusiastic about the internet and cellphone. This is most likely to be the Cancers, who thrive on the personal touch and the emotional connection that you can’t get through a cellphone and internet.

Regardless of the pressure being put on us by the Digital Age, each of us processes information in different ways.  This is revealed in the birthchart by the location of the planet Mercury along with other aspects and planetary placements.  It is no surprise that our relationship to the world of technology has so many varied signatures!

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Apple Inc News: Steve Jobs’ Mars Problem

January 14, 2009 By

Steve JobsSteve Jobs is the creative genius behind the Apple Computing brand.  After Jobs was forced out in 1985 the company floundered, reviving after he staged a takeover that brought him back as CEO.


Jobs has an interesting chart with the Sun in Pisces. Pisces is the sign of spirituality and transcending the boundaries of ordinary physical reality.  Pisces types are typically creative, inspirational, easygoing and meditative with a thirst for a spiritual experience.  They are also emotional and can be quite sensitive.  After dropping out of college, Jobs spent some time in 1974 backpacking through India, studying meditation and experimenting with psychedelic drugs.

Jupiter (optimism and confidence) is conjunct Uranus (innovation and radical behavior) in Jobs’ chart, signifying a person with a deeply restless nature, but also an innate ability to innovate and create.  Mars (the planet that defines how we assert our will and express our aggressive instinct) in his chart is in Aries, the sign which it rules.  That is an extremely forceful place for Mars to be; yet Jobs is a sensitive and easygoing Pisces.

Mars is afflicted in his chart: it is opposed by Neptune, the ruler of Pisces and a very watery planet – you know what happens when you pour a bucket of water (Neptune) over fire (Mars), the fire is likely to go out.  Mars is also in a challenging aspect to the Jupiter/Uranus combination, which shows that Jobs can have a very short fuse, but he may not, with his strongly Piscean nature, be able to release that fiery expression very easily.

It is said of Steve Jobs that he makes his own rules, which we can see in the Mars (drive) square to Jupiter/Uranus (radical behavior), and that is can be a temperamental manager which we can see in the Mars in Aries aggression opposed by Neptune’s martyrdom and dislike of conflict.

I have found that what I call “Mars problems” are very common in the charts of people with health problems.  When the aggressive instinct (which includes our ability to express our needs, to assert ourselves, and to express anger appropriately) is blocked, that fire energy is left without an appropriate outlet and often discharges within the body’s energy system, leading to a variety of health problems.

Since 2004 when Jobs first had a “neuroendocrine” tumor in the pancreas removed, he has had a series of planetary transits affecting this Mars complex in his chart.  First transiting Chiron (wounding and healing) ran across all of the planets in the complex beginning in June of 2003 (the tumor was discovered in October of that year).  Then Saturn (hardship and disappointment) in 2004 and 2005 (the tumor was removed in July of 2004 after a 9-month battle to find an alternative solution), accompanied by Uranus (radical and restless change) which transited the Ascendant and Sun in Jobs’s chart, stirring the emotional pot and creating the need to alter the status quo.  The combination of Uranus restlessness and Saturn restriction can evoke a frustration that implodes into the physical body if not properly expressed outwardly.

Jobs is just completing a cycle of transiting Chiron over Saturn in his chart which started earlier this year.  Transits of Chiron can bring out areas of imbalance in the body which then manifest as health problems, and Jobs has said that his doctors cannot determine why he is losing weight.  I would guess that Steve Jobs is not very well grounded in his body, and the energy imbalance within is eroding his physical vitality.

In taking a leave of absence, perhaps he will take the steps needed to maintain the inner balance he so badly requires.  If he were my client I would recommend a course of some kind of vigorous physical activity such as Kung Fu which is well suited to Piscean types with Mars problems (the combination of spirituality and aggression in the Eastern martial arts work well here).  Jobs has enough Pisces and Neptune that he will likely pursue just this path.

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The Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind

October 23, 2008 By

Newsweek has an article online that has been the topic of much discussion:

Is technology changing our brains? A new study by UCLA neuroscientistGary Small adds to a growing body of research that says it is. And according to Small’s new book, “iBRAIN: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind,” a dramatic shift in how we gather information and communicate with one another has touched off an era of rapid evolution that may ultimately change the human brain as we know it. “Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically,” he writes. “As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills.”

Uranus is the planet of technological innovation, and ever since it was discovered in the late 1700s the technological revolution has accelerated exponentially.  I believe it won’t be long before computers will be wired directly into our brain!!

Since Neptune entered Aquarius in the late 1990s following the Uranus/Neptune conjunction of 1992-1995, the boundaries between humans and technology (Uranus/Aquarius) have blurred (Neptune).  When Uranus entered Pisces in 2003, instigating the mutual reception that has been in place since then with Uranus in the sign ruled by Neptune and Neptune in the sign ruled by Uranus, this blurring has increased exponentially.  So really, for the last 15 years we have been wandering into uncharted technological territory.  This period saw the explosion of the internethttp://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/2_bing.gif and the wiring of nearly every human being on the planet into the World Wide Web.

This hard-wiring of technology into our brains comes easier for those of us who are already rather electrichttp://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/2_bing.gif in nature, with Uranus strong in our charts.  For others it’s a more difficult process.

For many, the online and wired world is already more real than the world of nature.  Can a more natural way of experiencing the world live in harmony with this technological alteration?  Only time will tell.

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Happy Birthday Google! And a Look at the Chrome Browser

September 7, 2008 By

Google Chrome

Google Chrome

I downloaded the Chrome browser from Google yesterday, and I have to say I love it!!  It’s fast, intuitive, it knows all of the sites I like and finds them quickly.  Chrome was released on September 2, with the Sun conjunct Saturn (restriction and hard work) in Virgo within one degree.  Fortunately, Jupiter (success and abundance) made a trine to the Sun and Saturn that day, lending its optimism and positive outlook to the discipline of Saturn making this a very fortunate time to release the new browser.  Moreover, Jupiter made an exact trine to the Sun in the Google chart (9/7/1998, Menlo Park, California) with Saturn and the Sun in close conjunction.

The chart for the Chrome browser includes the triple conjunction of Venus, Mercury and Mars all in Libra.  Chrome is an open-source venture, and the Google folks say they want to “collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.”   With all of the personal planets in Libra, the sign of partnership, this is likely to be a resounding success.  The only challenge is here is that Jupiter in the Chrome chart makes a square to Mars, signifying a tendency to be overconfident and perhaps impractical.

Except for the Jupiter square the astrology for the Chrome browser looks very good!!  And the chart for Chrome ties in nicely with the Google chart, including a beautiful trine from Mars in the Google chart to Uranus in the Chrome chart which suggests that the motivations of Google (Mars) will serve to successfully implement Google’s goal to facilitate completely unique ways (Uranus) of exploring the Web.

Right now Chrome is only available for Windows XP and Vista, but you can get it here.

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Our Wired Future – the Age of Aquarius?

January 14, 2007 By

Image from Tim Boucher

We like to think of the Age of Aquarius as the time of peace, love and understanding:

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind’s true liberation
Aquarius!!*

It’s a nice fantasy, and while Aquarius is indeed concerned with issues of fairness and equality and honesty, we mustn’t forget that Uranus is the modern ruler of Aquarius. Uranus is the planet of liberation and revelation, but also of technology. Bill Gates’s keynote speech last week to the Consumer Electronics show delivered a vision of the “Connected Experience” as provided by Microsoft, which connects everything we need for 21st century life so we never have to leave the house.

Don’t get me wrong – I am a technology addict and acclaimed gadget geek, and I love the connectedness that the wired experience provides. But there is a danger that a wired life of technology is beginning to replace real life. We’re connected via internet, television and cellphones, but how connected are we to our communities and family? At the dawn of the technology revolution it’s very exciting, but our friend Tim Boucher looks down this road and delivers this chilling report (do visit his site for films and images):

How many years this will take to happen, I can’t say. Maybe five years? But the world is going to look like this. You are going to walk around with an augmented reality device, as well as a variety of devices whose purpose is to record, sort and “index” audio, visual and other information about your experience of life. You will become the spiderbot for Google walking around and “crawling” the physical earth. You will be paid a modest amount for your data-collection efforts. We think of these technologies now as “tracking” and “surveillance” but those terms will fall away and be replaced by terms which more accurately reflect the breadth of cultural change these devices will entail. By way of analogy, you could think of your experience of life as going something like this. You walk around and perceive augmented or mixed reality through your headset.

Most people will eventually gravitate towards *only* perceiving reality through these devices because they add increased levels of richness of information. Then they will of course be implanted and you’ll experience only this world from birth. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before that time, companies will begin to store fully immersive digital simulations of your entire life experience. Think of it in terms of the online virtual world, SecondLife. The devices which are constantly monitoring you and recording your experience will transmit this information to an engine which will parse it and use it to create a stored 4-D copy of your entire life, from start to finish. At any time you like (if you have enough money), you will be able to access your own memories and fully experience them as though they were happening to you again. You (or the government-company which graciously leases you this technology) will also be able to license content from your life to other users, and be able to directly trade experiences. People who have a certain level of shared or common experiences will form clusters of consensus reality, consensciousness. What do you think your MySpace friends are for? Social networking online? Reality clusters. Who you allow into your shared experience of life. Who you give your world key to. Watch this short instructional music video about MySpace and tell me who has been bought and sold and what we are being trained for with increasingly physical and “real life” metaphors?

::snip::

There will be an immediate and furious backlash against this destruction of human identity, time and space as the outer biological limits of the human mind and information-processing faculties are quickly reached. A resulting planned push towards posthumanism will be made, based upon the arguments that most of our experiences at this point are all completely stored electronically. Ghost in the machine. Uploaded consciousness will be offered to transcend these processing and bandwidth limitations of reality, at which point what we think of as a “human” would be more compatible with what we think of nowadays as a “subculture.” We will consist of language patterns and inter-locking sets of shared experiences.

Science fiction? Perhaps, but I believe that the future holds experiences that go beyond what we can imagine today. We are already seeing problems with media addiction, a problem with its own label (internet and communication technology addiction, or ICT). With information coming only through the media, we lose the ability to process information independently and live as autonomous beings; instead we will become cogs in a huge wheel that is controlled by the media machine. The better alternative, I believe, is the choice to live a real and authentic life.

*(lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni from the musical Hair. )

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