Drought Inspires a Boom In Pseudoscience, From Rain Machines To 'Water Witches' 266
merbs (2708203) writes Across drought-stricken California, farmers are desperate for water. Now, many of them are calling dowsers. These "water witches," draped in dubious pseudoscience or self-assembled mythologies—or both—typically use divining rods and some sort of practiced intuition to "find" water. The professional variety do so for a fee. And business is booming. They're just part of a storied tradition of pseudoscientific hucksters exploiting our thirst for water, with everything from cloudbusters to rainmachines to New Age rituals.
1st post (Score:5, Funny)
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That might actually be useful if 1. The person being searched believes it works. 2. The person doing the searching knows how to read the expressions and gestures of the person being searched.
I'm given to understand that the highly effective Israeli airport security uses that kind of technique, although AFAIK props aren't involved. They ask you a question and it's not so much the answer they're looking for as it is the way you answer.
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They would, but nothing says respect my authoriti like a groping and a rapey scan.
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I had a forehead smacking moment last year when I mentioned this jokingly last year while camping at a friend's event. I said "They were basically selling dowsing rods for explosives" and one of my friend's pipes in, with all seriousness: "Oh that is fine, dowsing works!".....sigh.....
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A great replacement for water is DM (dihydrogen-monoxide).
Unfortunately it costs a little bit more than water, but it's more efficient so it's worth the extra cost.
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Drip Irrigation
-costs too much to install
Change to less water intensive crops
-don't make as much profit
Desalination
-desalination plant costs too much
We need to make the maximum amount of money NOW, before it's too late.
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Desalination is great if you got a pond of saltwater ready right next your property, but unfortunately for most people it would require shipping, or infrastructure, or commercial utilities getting into it. Even if commercial utilities can get it done at a low price, they have no reason not to make a profit and rape everyone in the ass with whatever the price the market is willing to bear. The only downward force on the price is your ability to say no to their price, and either live without water or get your
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Eww.. (Score:2)
Re:Eww.. (Score:4, Insightful)
just your county? that employee is a canary. you should feel bad for the whole country.
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How do you know it was a dowsing rod, and not him looking for the wire by its induced magnetic field, like one of these [fujitecom.com]?
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Just to put this report in context. There is no such thing as 'the Sacramento County Water District'.
Closest is 'Sacramento Suburban Water District'. It's balkanized as hell. I've got tasty river water. Other neighborhoods get well water. Don't buy a house anywhere without tasting the water first.
Weigh the rest of this 'data' appropriately.
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Seen that too, and the guy found the pipe. This was on an Indian rez and a tribal utility worker. Not that I go for that stuff but it was an impressive display of what the subconscious can do.
It's OK to attack mythology and superstition... (Score:5, Insightful)
...unless someone was taught it over a series of Sundays. :/
I suppose ignorance on things like this is generational, and we'll stamp it out slowly, like racism or smoking.
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Both of those are fairly recent innovations. The fad will fade in a few generations, probably (sadly) to replaced by new fad pseudoscience.
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The ignorant just keep re-inventing things, convincing themselves that it really works (this time).
You are attacking the wrong target. The intelligent people repackage these and create new rhetoric to convince the ignorant that they work. Normally they can become pretty wealthy before they are told to stop, which only happens after enough of the ignorant petition grievances.
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UFOs actually exist. Yes, they do. Not to say that they are aliens but there's a long and well documented history of flying objects we can't identify.
So how about we spend a few generations stamping out atttitudes like yours and then we can view the world as it really is.
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Either there are multiple groups of aliens, each running around a different content. Or the Aliens are a mixture of folklore, hucksters and psychos.
There are persistently different types of aliens reported, separated by earthbound culture.
Western Europe: Greys...anal probes.
South America/Africa: Big headed, sharp toothed, hungry...no anal probes.
Asia: Yet another variation, which I forget.
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You forget that aliens are often branded as "science" (minus the fiction of course). Watch a few Discovery and National Graphic TV shows, and remember that those are supposed to be our "educational programming" networks.
Prefixing an argument with "Scientists believe that" is an easy way to dupe people that want to believe they are more intelligent than those other people. That particular appeal to authority is used quite often with good effect.
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You are willing believe in aliens from other worlds, time travel and the idea all this can be kept hidden but a person being able to witch a well is a bridge too far?
Where's the evidence? If the Greys land in front of the White House in a flying saucer and ask to be taken to our leader, then I would allow that there's something to this UFO stuff. Who knows? You might too.
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I suppose ignorance on things like this is generational, and we'll stamp it out slowly, like racism or smoking.
I hate to break it to you, but... ignorance is on the rise.
Re:It's OK to attack mythology and superstition... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want a good laugh ask a Christian why they believe in God and Jesus and the Holy spirit, but not in Zeus or Odin or Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. If you get anything other than circular logic or "because" let me know.
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I got an honest answer once.
Re:It's OK to attack mythology and superstition... (Score:4, Interesting)
Too true. People believe, because they were taught to believe, from an early age by people they trust. The vast majority of Christians (insert religion of your choice here) are Christian by an accident of birth.
You have a source for that? Anecdotally from my church a large percentage of folks joining came to faith later in life (college, etc). Looking at a poll on this [pewforum.org] indicates that thats about right-- 40% or so tend to switch from what they were raised with, 60% do not. Im really not sure in what world "60%" forms a vast majority, but whatever.
Its sort of hillarious to hear people talk of ignorance and then bust out anecdotal and unsupported "facts" like this.
If you want a good laugh ask a Christian why they believe in God and Jesus and the Holy spirit, but not in Zeus or Odin or Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. If you get anything other than circular logic or "because" let me know.
Do you mock Stephen Hawkings declaration that the universe self-created itself because "there is such a thing as gravity", for being circular reasoning? Why not?
Re:It's OK to attack mythology and superstition... (Score:4, Informative)
You have a source for that?
The poll that you supplied supports GP's argument. From the data, 40% of people change religion after birth, but over half of that is caused by people switching "within the same tradition" (e.g. changing from Baptist to Methodist or Agnostic to Atheist), and most of the rest is people leaving the church altogether. Only 4% of people in the survey were raised outside of religion and later joined a religion. So of all religious people in the survey, 96% got there by being born, and the other 4% were raised non-religious and then later became affiliated with a religion. By any reasonable definition, 96% is a "vast majority".
As to your anecdote, some denominations (e.g. Charismatic) cater to the "born again" crowd and so will be composed of a lot of converts, which others (Catholic, Episcopal) are composed almost entirely of people who were born or married into the faith.
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it's the afterlife predictions of the former that people actually experience when they die
If they can explain their afterlife experience, they weren't really dead, and what they experienced wasn't the afterlife.
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...unless someone was taught it over a series of Sundays. :/
I suppose ignorance on things like this is generational, and we'll stamp it out slowly, like racism or smoking.
Oh yes, I'm sure it's the massive fundamentalist Christian population of California that's doing all the dowsing, rather than minuscule population of oh so scientific crystal-using copper-bracelet-wearing leftist nutbars.
The Christian affinity for witches and divining and such being so well established and all.
Thanks Slashdot, for all the "insight"!
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This will sound like the "nobody cares about Jews" joke, but how does leftist fit in there? Desire for increased social equality seems Christian to me.
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... or that humanity can continue to multiply exponentially because God will end the game before too many people become a serious problem.
On the flip side, since many of the most devout religionists are prone to war and episodes of mass suicide, perhaps they will inadvertently help with the overpopulation problem.
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Who seriously thinks smoking is harmless?
For that matter, who seriously thinks life is harmless?
Life is so hard there's zero chance you're getting out alive.
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There have been 107 billion humans who ever lived, and about 7 billion of them are still alive. Therefore, the odds of death are actually only about 94%.
; )
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Lighten up, Francis.
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And zero evidence of any of the prior roughly 100 billion (your estimate again, going with your thought experiment) having gotten out alive.
Well, there's not much evidence that they got out dead either. It's not like anyone's counted the bodies to make sure we got everyone.
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But I don't think the experiment is completely over.
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As is true with politics, there are people who will accept no new evidence if it contradicts their belief set.
Two examples that seem to prove this theory are religion and superstition, but I repeat myself.
Re:It's OK to attack mythology and superstition... (Score:5, Funny)
To quote Cecil Adams:
As it's always gone (Score:4, Insightful)
People who are suffering, ignorant, and afraid are more willing to turn to the supernatural - be it religion or superstitions - as a 'solution' to their problems.
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People who are suffering, ignorant, and afraid are more willing to turn to the supernatural - be it religion or superstitions - as a 'solution' to their problems.
Definitely.
I see parallels between this and any number of other situations that make people desperate:
* Cancer patients turning to stem cell "remedies" from quacks who don't bother looking for evidence
* People with autistic children who can't find a cause so they blame vaccines
* People who can't see any obvious good options, so they turn to psychics
Fear is a wonderful tool if you're a charlatan, as it makes your victims less likely to pause and ask whether you're actually qualified to do (or to know) any of
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People who are suffering, ignorant, and afraid are more willing to turn to the supernatural - be it religion or superstitions - as a 'solution' to their problems.
This.
There's an old Russian proverb: "Pray to God, but continue to row to shore."
If a problem requires action to solve, you can't just pray it away. On the other hand, if you're powerless to do anything about a problem, you may turn to a spiritual salve in order to cope. I have no problem with spiritual practitioners who offer the salve. But if they claim to solve the problem, then I burn with contempt for them.
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Have you been paying attention:
Synthetic opioids are the opium of the masses. Duh.
Bread, circuses and oxycontin.
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Im sure thats exactly why Christians in Egypt, Syria, and first century Rome turned to Christianity: to reduce their suffering.
What's the problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Let's say I'm a farmer, but I don't want to hire a geologist because a dowser is cheaper. The dowser causes me to dig 3 wells and find water only on the third. Then I pay their flat fee. I have expended resources and time to dig those two previous wells, causing me not to have those resources or time to do other things with. A dowser is less effective than a geologist and bears, at the minimum, a higher opportunity cost over the average (of instances of people searching for water with a dowser instead of a
Re:What's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
A dowser is less effective than a geologist and bears, at the minimum, a higher opportunity cost over the average (of instances of people searching for water with a dowser instead of a geologist).
A fine economic analysis, but you're forgetting the balance-of-costs comparison.
If what you saved using a dowser (who, by your own scenario, is cheaper than a geologist) is more than the cost of two wasted wells, the dowser was a cost-effective alternative. In that case.
If, on the other hand, the dowser wasn't much cheaper, or you had to sink 5 dry wells, or your dowser never finds water, the dowser was a net loss.
I think that on balance, the latter scenarios are more likely. If you're thinking about choosing dowsing, you're better off just throwing darts at a large map of your property and saving that cost for the same effectiveness.
But if you're going to do an economic analysis, show all your work.
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It seems like specifying a contract where you're going to pay for the well digging and he gets as many tries as he wants to select well sites isn't likely to lead to a good outcome whether he's a dowser or a geologist. Pay for performance seems like a lot better model than pay for consultation in this instance. Of course, I dare you to find a dowser who would actually agree to that kind of contract, heh.
Better still is payment based on past performance. Whether he's a dowser or a geologist, how many times in the past has he succeeded as a fraction of his attempts? If dowsing is a crock (and I think it is) and study of geology actually improves the probability of finding water, then the geologist should win over time. Unless, of course, the dowser has actually acquired an intuitive sense of geology, and the dowsing rod is just a prop.
Of course, I doubt you will find a dowser who is willing to compare his
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Not the well driller. The dowser.
He gets $X (say the cost of 3 holes), he pays the drill rig until he finds water. Even if the rigs costs exceed $X.
They would not take the deal. Unless they knew there was water everywhere. Even then...
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He also forgot the third column in his test: "Use neither a geologist nor a dowser" Since that'll be just as accurate as using a dowser, it'll be the winning column for sure.
On the first reading.... (Score:2)
Wait, a dowser is less effective than bears, at the minimum? What kind of low bar do bears set? Where does one go to hire a bear to find water and how do they go about it?
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TL;DR: It's called wasting your time. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Tell that to my Casio, I'll let you know when its 88:88
Devil's Advocate (Score:2, Informative)
OK, if someone claims to be able to find water with a stick, takes your money then doesn't find water, are they committing fraud?
Let's test this: Did they *guarantee* to find water? If yes, then fraud happened.
If no, then fraud did not happen.
Why? Because they only claimed to be able to find water, they did not guarantee that there would be water under the test area.
HOWEVER, if it is known that water is under the test area (and this can be proved contemporaneously with the dowsing), then fraud did occur bec
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Water well drillers have been the contractors of choice to locate underground reservoirs wherever I've lived, and they usually relied on knowledge of aquifers in their respective locales.
Caveat: They often require payment to drill the well whether they find water or not, and there's no guarantee on the volume your new well might produce.
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realtor. (Score:3)
I was looking at an acreage and asked the realtor if he knew where the septic field was.. He said no but would find it. He grabbed a wire coat hanger out of the closet, bent it into some divining sticks, and went outside trudging through 2' deep snow... My wife and I just kind of glanced at one another and rolled our eyes... Thing is, he honestly thought he was helping...
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the question is ... did the realtor find it ?
Could try sacrificing virgins (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Could try sacrificing virgins (Score:4, Informative)
"but it's California, so they may be hard to find."
Only if you restrict said virgins to females. There are plenty of male nerd virgins living in their parent's garage (we generally don't have basements here).
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I am one of the male virgins!
Not surprising (Score:4, Funny)
It sounds like a typical reaction:
"No, I'm afraid we can't fix this. We're going to have to work around our problem... Conserve water, reuse wa.... No, no! Don't pay the fucking witch doctor for a rain dance!"
There's an app for that ... (Score:2)
... look up Water Witch in Google Play.
It's free.
If you download it in the next 15 minutes, it's ABSOLUTELY free.
Desalination is the only viable answer (Score:2)
In San Diego, California, USA where I live we have an initiative to build the worlds largest Desalination plant of its kind, yet are plagued by the state constantly forcing setbacks. Partially EPA related, partially playing card material for the Governor Jerry Brown.
China has a similar design going into effect right now and achieving an effective and profitable desalination design. Still, it comes down to two things:
1) Economy of scale in desalination (how much) There is currently a break point in efficienc
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I have to wonder why not back to the ocean (sufficiently diluted to avoid a high concentration area, of course) the water the sludge came out of will end up back there, why not the sludge?
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uh no (Score:4, Insightful)
This has nothing to do with farmers, or droughts.
Plenty of people here on Slashdot believe in:
Ghosts
Vaccines cause Autism
Sugar is poisonous
Gluten sensitivity
Alien visitors
Wifi allergies
and on and on and on...
Some people are desperate for water, others are desperate to explain their childs ailments, desperate to explain their own ailments, desperate to live in a world different than our own. Desperate people will believe strange things. Myth is the anesthesia for anguish.
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Look up Coeliac DIsease.
That's an actual verifiable reaction to gluten that can cause death. Charliemopps is talking about the now popular gluten intolerance. Funnily enough, I myself feel a bit bloated after stuffing a couple of sandwiches down my gullet.
It's everywhere (Score:2)
I called the local call-before-you-dig number because I was having foundation work done and you have to have an underground lines located before you can so much as plant bedding plants around here. A lady showed up and followed procedure for the gas and electrical lines then she pulled out her water witching wands to locate the rest of the stuff. Crazy. I called and left a complaint but they never got back to me. One day she's going to have some equipment malfunction and she's going to use her wands to loca
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she's going to use her wands to locate an electrical line
But you saw her 'follow procedure' for the dangerous stuff. Everything else (water, sewer, cable, telephone) will be a nuisance if it's cut. But it won't kill anyone.
I don't know why she dowses for some stuff, but uses tech for the important stuff. I've been in the utility business for long enough that I can usually spot the water meters, sewer clean-outs and network interface boxes and make an educated guess about where stuff was installed. The witching wands are probably her way of keeping most customers
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Probably because gas and electric are easy to find using a defined procedure. They are also the most important to find.
Water witching (Score:2)
I know it sounds batshit crazy. I know it's not science. I know I'll be moderated to "shutup dumbass". I'll say it anyway.
I grew up in rural Oregon. My family moved there in the early 70's, from California. We bought a big chunk of land, with nothing but trees on it. We pitched two tents, and started searching for the best house site. We filled 5 gallon bottles at the neighbors for a while, until we decided where to build the house.
The neighbor's father was a well witcher. We assumed that it was part of a b
Speaking of New Age rituals... (Score:2)
Re:A fool and their money (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: A fool and their money (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this runs against everything /. but I have seen it work a couple of times.
Why do you think that an unconfirmed anecdote being presented fallaciously as an argument is against everything /.?
It would actually be astonishing if no one had "seen it work a couple of times", for several reasons. One, if there were a 100% failure rate dousing would have been abandoned years ago. Even pre-scientific peoples mostly abandoned things that were never, ever correlated with their nominal goals.
Second, given humans are known to be prone to confirmation bias, we can predict that almost everyone who has ever seen a dowser identify one of the many, many places where water can be found will come away believing "dowsing works".
So a large number of scientifically illiterate people saying, "Hey I saw it work a few times that proves it's true so I believe it!" is exactly what science would predict if dowsing doesn't work.
If dowsing did work science would predict a bunch of peer-reviewed studies systematically detailing how accurate it is and investigating the factors that influence it's accuracy.
We see the former, not the latter.
Posts like yours actually constitute evidence that dowsing does not work.
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While I cannot account for anyone else. I once owned some land, and tried my hand at dowsing. Found 3 spots that felt just right, drilled the first, and found water at 70 feet. I still call it luck. If I ever need to look for water again, I'll try my hand at it again and mark 3 spots.
While it's not science, I would be interested in how do you set up a test for a peer review of this. Seems to me that if I really think about it. It's just a lot of pot luck.
Re: A fool and their money (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite likely (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: A fool and their money (Score:5, Insightful)
Found 3 spots that felt just right, drilled the first, and found water at 70 feet.
How deep did you have to drill for the holes in the control group?
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As a start, I'd say: pick 3 spots that feel right, pick 3 spots that feel wrong, and pick 3 spots via some randomization method. Then drill all 9. Repeat over a few thousand plots of land. Compare results.
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I guess to test it you would do just what you described, but with an added control - three points chosen randomly (on a map, preferably by a computer RNG). After enough repetitions you could build up a confidence interval to determine whether you could reject the null hypothesis (that the spots marked by dowsing lead to no more water than the random ones).
Re: A fool and their money (Witching Sticks) (Score:2, Funny)
But the
Re: A fool and their money (Witching Sticks) (Score:4, Insightful)
The Amazing Randy has $1 million waiting for you to come and claim. You fucking liar.
Re: A fool and their money (Witching Sticks) (Score:5, Funny)
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That's the thing with water too. There's a water table in many places, and if you dig and find water chances are if you move 100 feet in any direction and dig you'll find water too. Other times the dowsers instinctively head to where water is most likely, stream beds, depressions in the earth, etc. Where dowsing fails though is in a blind test, they absolutely do not find water reliably in closed opaque barrels where neither tester nor testee know which has water.
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That tells us only that it isn't the water itself that the witcher can locate. It says nothing about the ability to find a geologic structure that will typically have water.
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"Hey I saw it work a few times that proves it's true so I believe it!"
But he didn't actually say that, did he? He said he'd seen it work a couple of times. Everyone here knows the difference between plural anecdotes and data.
He presented it as an anecdote, and you still feel a duty to run him into the ground?
I'm actually interested in the discussion. What the fuck are we supposed to talk about here then, anyway?
100% would be interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
One, if there were a 100% failure rate dousing would have been abandoned years ago.
Actually if the failure rate was exactly 100%, it would be a valuable tool:
it would very reliabily show where NOT to look for water, and by deduction you'll know that you need to look for water at the remaining NOT dowsed places.
The real failure rate would be something very high, but not close to 100%.
By random chance, you're bound to find water, eventually.
The whole point of a scientific statistical test would be to see if the few successes occur as frequently as random chance, or if dowsing has a slightly higher success rate that could NOT be explained purely by random chance.
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My father-in-law believed he could "witch" wires, pipes, or whatever, using two pieces of copper wire. Funny thing is, he could never repeat a witching while blindfolded. We figured that decades in the construction industry meant that he could subconsciously spot the clues where a typical pipeline would be run.
If I were planning where to run tile in a field, I'd look for the low spot, and the easiest, straightest run from there to a drainage ditch. Doesn't take beechwood sticks or copper wires to figure tha
Re: A fool and their money (Score:5, Informative)
once you get below the level of the water table you find water.
similar story just outside blarney apart from no douser involved just a big drill that went down until water was found. Ireland has no shortage of water. Outside the cities septic tanks are usual and wells are fairly common place. With water charges coming in for domestic water, there may be a little boom in well digging.
Re: A fool and their money (Score:5, Insightful)
my father called the local dowser in for his house in a remote part of SW Ireland.
The low areas of Ireland get more than 40 inches of rain a year, and the mountains get as much as 80 inches. I would be much more surprised if he found an area without ground water.
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so, a stick/rod/object made of a variety of materials but in a particular and non-exact shape has special water-locating scientific properties?? give me a break. unless your dowser is drilling 'control holes' to prove that its not possible for him to always be correct due to the geography, its just another anecdote. look, everyone who drank my snake oil w
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