It seems obvious that Nostradamus was a quack. But thanks to sensationalist modern documentaries a lot of people get convinced that he was onto something. Fortunately Cecil Adams from The Straight Dope comes to the rescue yet again.
Aside:
The Straight Dope (motto = fighting ignorance since 1973) is a great blog. Readers email in interesting (and funny/strange) questions and this guy, Cecil Adams (self-proclaimed most intelligent human being) researches the hell out of them.
His answers are almost always both informative and humorous. I recommend the site. Incidentally more then 30 US newspapers agree with me and publish his column weekly.
Anyway, his latest posting is about Nostradamus and he points out that Nostradamus was inaccurate and only seems good because:
- He made so many predictions that were so vague that it is possible to fit many of them onto things that have since happened. No concrete predictions.
- During the translation from the original French a lot of the predictions have been seriously twisted to sound more plausible.
Take a look at the article for some good examples to see what I mean.
But then, it was pretty obvious that this was bull right? Seriously. It sounded cool, but were you seriously going to believe that someone could foretell the future? Seriously?