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Iraq Swears By Dowsing Rod Bomb Detector
jggimi writes "According to the New York Times, more than fifteen hundred remote sensing devices have been sold to Iraq's Ministry of the Interior, at prices ranging from $16,500 to $60,000 each. The devices are used for bomb and weapon detection at checkpoints, and have no battery or other power source. Sounds great, but according to a retired United States Air Force officer, Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack, they work on the same principle as a Ouija board — the power of suggestion. He described the wand as nothing more than an explosives divining rod. Even though the device has been debunked by the US Military, the US Department of Justice, and even Sandia National Laboratories, the Iraqis are thrilled with the devices. 'Whether it's magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs,' said Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, head of the Ministry of the Interior's General Directorate for Combating Explosives."
where those billions and billions of dollars went.
Sure, it finds bombs, but youre spending hours wandering around and forgetting about the time you didnt find a bomb.
Because our 'good men' made the mess in the first place. If you make a mess, clean it up. That's good advice for a pre-schooler, and good advice for presidents.
Qxe4
It works on a very simple principle, that is used in many devices sold today: the company that makes them probably kicks half the price back to the official who authorized the purchase.
Anyone see the Bugs Bunny cartoon (@6:40) where he was working on an assembly line during WW2? He had a little hammer that he would tap bombs with to see if they were good or not. Of course one after another was a dud, until finally...
I guess if your divining rod detects a suicide bomber... then what? They detonate? I guess it is 100% effective in that case. Bomb detected.
Better known as 318230.
they shouldn't be allowed to have the bomb.
Hmm ... you do realise that's Iraq with a Q, not with an N? The country with the nuclear weapons^Wpower program is next door.
Here in the U.S., a great many of our police departments and even federal agencies spend millions on a technology that is equally ridiculous and unprovable in any sort of peer-reviewed scientific study: Lie detectors. If we can have our lie detectors, then surely the Iraqis are entitled to their bomb sniffing dowsing rods.
The proponents of these devices, when confronted with the undeniable technical worthlessness of them, inevitably retreat to the claim that the actual benefits come from the psychology of having people being "investigated" by the devices believe that they are actually capable of something, and then watching their reactions.
Right, because we're so much smarter than the Iraqis. We have never had dumb/superstitious people in charge of our military. Therefore they can't handle nukes and we can. /sarcasm
I'd argue that mutually assured destruction is dumber than what we're seeing here. Both are pretty shocking, but "magic bomb detector" risks at most several soldiers' lives, not, you know, everything.
In case you forgot, our leaders were the ones that relied on MAD. With all our eductation and logic, that is what we came up with. If this is the dumbest thing Iraq is doing coming out of Saddam's rule, with little recent history of competent leaders, they're doing pretty well. I wouldn't want them to have nukes, but we're not people who should have nukes either.
Oh don't worry, I've got a saying for every situation. Here's one you may have heard, "leave a place better than you found it." Or at very least don't leave it worse than you found it. If we had left Iraq a few years ago and let it fall into civil war, things would have been bad.
That's the altruistic way of looking at it. If you want a more selfish reason to keep supporting them, try this one: the middle east is likely to be an important region of the world for years to come, until we find alternatives to oil. Don't you think it would be useful to have a contingent of power in the heart of the area? Cheney and Bush sure did.
In any case, it's silly for you to get upset about Iraq because we've been withdrawing according to schedule for many months now. If you don't like the schedule, that's fine, maybe you can come up with an argument against it.
Qxe4
Wow. If you heard it from a co-worker, it must be true!
Because our 'good men' made the mess in the first place. If you make a mess, clean it up. That's good advice for a pre-schooler, and good advice for presidents.
It's also a recipe for an endless, bloody war. Especially when the populace doesn't want you there and the politicians you are supporting are massively corrupt.
Before America showed up they had a tyrant dictator who had the good sense to stay out of religious disputes in an area where people with religious disputes are prone to making their case with guns and bombs, even if it means taking their own lives.
We then invaded this not-so-idyllic nation with not so much as a whit of an idea about what to do to turn such a place into a thriving democracy, when doing so would be plainly unfair to the minorities in the religious disputes.
Democracy works when reasonable people come together and are willing to make decisions and sacrifices for the betterment of all the people. It does not work, sadly, in nations where it has been forced into existence replacing an existing corrupt government that the people had no faith in, and no reason to believe in the new government.
Perhaps I'm oversimplifying, but it seems to me that the way to bring "peace" to the Middle East would be through reason, brutally slow diplomacy and encouraging expression of ideas and open debates, encouraging education of children male and female, etc. Basically, using the thin edge of the wedge. Instead we came in with guns and bombs, things these people are all too familiar with, and the ones who don't like us responded in kind.
That's like saying it is ok for me to shit in my roommates bed because he hardly ever cleans.
A quick search suggests that polygraphs normally outperform random chance. By how much seems to be highly variable.
It appears the scientific evidence is that polygraphy is not sufficiently sensitive or specific to be useful as legal evidence, but there's a big difference between a functional but inaccurate technique (i.e. one that outperforms guessing) and one that doesn't.
You can't argue with results. Even if you would say that without the MAD doctrine we would have survived without major issues, it's impossible ot argue conclusively against that MAD didn't not work.
It is incredibly easy to be skeptical and cynical, until you have seen something that rivals the best magician's trick. From a guy who spent most of every day of his life by himself.
So did you believe the magician's claim that he has supernatural powers, too? If an old man with a stick and a talent for miming can fool you into thinking that dead wood can turn "into a straining, curving, living thing" and detect water, I've got a card trick to show you.
In my mind there was simply no way you could hold a branch and make it do that -- the branch itself wanted to do it, and did it.
I've located the source of the problem, highlighted above.
It's funny, but people seem to be tolerant of their own messes more readily than somebody else's, especially when it's their country. I'm not saying we didn't make a lot of things better, but if you want gratitude for coming in and fixing somebody else's country, man, the bar is high. Especially when you have all kinds of ethnic and religious fault lines running through the country, which pretty much means every time you scratch your ass, millions of people on one side win and millions on the other lose.
My problem with the war all along was that once the original WMD rationale didn't pan out, there wasn't any kind of strategic focus. I caught some flack from my fellow liberals when I said, well, doing such and so is probably good, or the surge will probably reduce violence. But the problem was never that there weren't worthwhile things to get done. It was that the "and then what happens" part seldom got thought through very far, and the "and then after that" part about never. We would invade "and then we'd be greeted as liberators." Ok and what happens after that? We'd rebuild X schools, yeah that's good. But then what happens after that? If we use much higher troop levels, we can control violence better (well, duh). And then what? Actually the surge was probably the most promising piece of strategy in the war, because there actually *were* a lot of things we wanted to be able to do in the breathing space that gave us. But we didn't know *how* to do them and most of them didn't happen.
And there was never a sequence of milestones that ended like this: "and then Iraq was able to manage its own internal and external security and most of our guys get to come home." Maybe it wasn't humanly possible to envision a series of milestones like that, between the Kurds and the Sunni and the Shia and the outside interference from Iran and Jihadi groups. Still, much of the strategic thinking in Washington seemed to amount to this: we were fighting there so we could get to keep on fighting there.
That's the problem with sending our good men and women -- and even the *bad* men and women too like those shits in the Abu Ghraib photos -- to die.. It's not that there aren't imaginable goals that are worth the cost, or that even helping the people of Iraq isn't worth the cost. It's that without a better strategy, the only certain payoff for the death of one of guys has been that we get to send *more* of our guys to be killed. That's a mindset that has for any practical purpose accepted defeat, but won't admit it for political reasons.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Of course, it also doesn't hurt that dowsing using rods for drugs in schools amounts to essentially a random search, increasing the probability that you'll get caught with contraband even though there is zero correlation between the rod's response and actual contraband. Administrators could say, "We roll the dice, and if they come up snake eyes, you get searched," and end up with a pretty good drop in drug activity. Then again, people would be up in arms about that.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Confirmation of the success of MAD could only come from the testimony of people who could and would confirm that they did not launch nuclear attacks against (US/USSR) due to fear of massive reprisal.
Either way, MAD is an idea, and it's one that works, at least in theory. If it worked in practice, it saved a large percentage of the world population from annihilation.
It's f'ing retarded to liken it, in any way, to bomb diving rods in Iraq.
Neither of which is the same thing as ferromagnetic.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Anyone who gets the chance to meta mod needs to fix this. Disagreeing with the parent does not make him a troll.
Please down mod the parent. People do not get down modded because others disagree with them. There is no -1 I think this guys beliefs are a crock.
A recommendation that the moderation system be abused to censor opposing viewpoints is certainly a troll at the very least.
'Democracy works when reasonable people come together and are willing to make decisions and sacrifices for the betterment of all the people.'
Ahhh... so thats why democracy hasn't shown any sign of being a successful form of government.
Don't ask me how it works - those witching sticks are just dead wooden sticks in my hands. But, I've seen it work, so I have to believe in it.
No, you don't. As Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
We use the scientific process precisely because we can't just trust ourselves. A few weeks ago, I climbed on a mountain, sat in the grass, and watched the clouds. Suddenly, the clouds started to move backwards and forwards. It's a miracle! I've seen it with my own eyes! Well, no. It's an optical illusion that some people get when staring into a bright light for too long.
Likewise, since all experiments have shown that dowsing rods work exactly as well as random chance, the most likely explanation for your father in law's ability is that he's able to subconsciously deduce where pipes go and where they are broken based on the effects these things have on the environment. That also explains why it doesn't work for you.
'Either you have facts, or you have nothing.'
That is an interesting viewpoint. But there are no readouts from instrumentation here. And this isn't a peer reviewed journal. This isn't even a forum for science. Slashdot comments are nothing but individuals expressing their opinions and everyone is entitled to one even one most think is unfounded or ridiculous.
"Your parent pointed out facts. You want people to mod him down because you don't seem to like these facts."
No he stated his opinion of the current state of the facts. You in turn stated your own unfounded opinion of my views. I didn't say anything about my own view on the issue. But if anyone cares, I am highly skeptical to claims of dowsing.
I do however think that any previous studies on the matter aside the fact that soldiers who are literally dying in the field are finding the rods to work as well or better than other instrumentation at finding bombs merits a closer look.
Claiming that dowsing water works no better than chance is one thing since there is water all over the place. Even in Iraq bombs aren't exactly everywhere like water is. The chances of a man without instrumentation picking out the location of a bomb without knowing if one exists are plenty slim. Let alone for this to happen enough that the Iraqis are willing to bet their lives on the products.
Let's rewind time a bit; suppose Einstein's advice was followed and the U.S. didn't build the bomb. No Hiroshima or Nagasaki as testament to its effects. It is known the Soviet Union was working on their own as was Germany. After the war, both the Soviets and the U.S. rushed to grab German scientists. So even if the Soviet Union wasn't working on it during the war, they'd have been working on it after. And they were led by that great humanitarian, Stalin. Hmmmm....what would a Stalin do with nukes knowing no one could retaliate...I give up, I cannot guess...
Let's assume that Stalin gets a case of Empathy and decides not to nuke his enemies, even the real ones. Roll time forward a bit. Iran decides it needs nukes to get out the Kill-the-Jews vote in Islam. The U.S., having eschewed nukes because they were bad, would surely have pressured Israel into no nukes as well. There is no stopping Iran from getting a nuke, they need it to help bring back the Mahdi and well, y'know, there are still some undead Jews.
Then there are those nice N. Koreans who are about as well adjusted as a squirrel after his third cup of coffee. Would you like L.A. with that holocaust or just a bit of self-indulgent sugar?
It's called a water 'table' for a reason. It spreads horizontally and follows the contours of the land generally. So pretty much anywhere you dig, if you dig far enough, you're going to find water.
Now, if they are dousing out individual springs, that might be something, but as others have mentioned, proof that it happens any better than random is lacking.
Even when they 'find' water, proof that other places didn't have water is required for any substantive belief that they 'found' anything on a better than random chance.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people