▥ Does astrology match my life, or is it chance? Keep receipts and see

The fair complaint is that a reading fits because anything would. Umbriel's free Receipts asks for one line a day about what actually happened, and after 60 days lines those words up against the sky and tells you straight what it finds. Often that is nothing, and it says so.

• What you'll needNothing: no chart, no birth details and no account
• What you getOne line a day kept in your journal; a countdown to a first read at 60 days; then your own words against eight pieces of sky, with every rate's 95% range, the number of pairings looked at, how many would look real by luck alone, and how many more days it would take to tell
• CostFree, no account required

A horoscope that fits every day is not saying anything. The remedy is a record that does not care what the horoscope said: write down, each evening, one thing that happened, in under 8 words. "Fixed the tap." "Rain all afternoon." "Tired." It is a receipt, not a diary.

Until you have 60 days with a line, the page shows a countdown and nothing else. Below that a word can sit on a piece of sky by luck on almost any day, so saying anything would be worse than saying nothing. The days need not be in a row, and a gap is only a gap.

Then it lines your words up against the sky you were under: the Moon's element, waxing or waning, the days near a New or Full Moon, and Mercury retrograde. Those eight are fixed before it reads a word of yours. It reports, for the best-looking pairing, how often the word turned up on days with that sky against all the other days, with the range each rate could honestly be.

It also tells you how many pairings it looked at. With dozens of possible patterns, some will look real by chance alone: about one in twenty will clear the ordinary bar with nothing behind it. So the verdict is not a pairing's own p-value. The sky each of your lines belonged to is shuffled 1,000 times, and each time the best-looking of all the pairings is kept; a finding has to beat the best of those.

A null result is a finding. Most people's answer will be "inside noise", and the page says that plainly and kindly, with the count of days it would take to tell if the gap you have were real. It is not a test of astrology and it is not a test of you. It can only say whether your own words sat on the sky more than shuffling gives, and it cannot say why.

Your lines are entries in your journal. They stay on your devices, in the private part, and are never posted anywhere.

Nothing is looked up. Each evening you write one line about something that happened, up to 7 words. It is kept as an entry in your journal, stamped with the day. Once you have 60 days with a line, in any order and with gaps, the app takes the sky at noon where you are for each of those days, from the same VSOP87 and ELP-2000 engine that draws every chart on this site, and asks eight things of it, fixed in the code before any line is read: whether the Moon was in a fire, earth, air or water sign, whether it was waxing, whether it was within about two days of a New or a Full Moon, and whether Mercury was retrograde. The words are the ones you use: a word is tested only if it is in your line on at least 6 days, and at most the 40 you use on most days; small words, and words about hurt or loss, are left out. Every qualifying word against every qualifying piece of sky (one that has at least 8 days with it and 8 without) is one pairing, and the page prints how many there were. A pairing is compared as a rate: the share of days with the sky that carry the word, against the share of the other days, each with its 95% Wilson interval. Because many pairings are looked at, a pairing's own p-value is not the verdict. The verdict is a shuffle: the sky each line belonged to is dealt out again 1,000 times, in week-long runs so a stretch of similar days cannot pass for evidence, and each time the best-looking of all the pairings is kept. A finding has to beat the best of those. The days-to-tell figure is arithmetic: how many days it would take for the gap you have now to beat the shuffles, if it is real and holds, which is optimistic and is labelled as such.