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Drought Inspires a Boom In Pseudoscience, From Rain Machines To 'Water Witches'
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.
Dowsers? They need THIS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Here in Sacramento, I saw somebody from the county water district using dousing rods while on the job. I'm not sure if he was looking for a pipe or what, and I was sadly too preoccupied to inquire with the water district to see if it's standard procedure, but, shit. I felt bad for my county.
...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.
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.
As long as the contract stipulates payment only after confirmation of findings, who cares if they use geology or dowsing?
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 because that would prove that either the stick operator knows the stick is broken or someotherhow malfunctioning, or his method is hokum as either way he FAILED to detect what he claimed to be able to detect yet it was present at the material time.
(up until 1951 witchcraft was illegal in England, since then it has been the burden upon the accuser not to apply an ambiguous label to someone's behaviour, but to prove that his actions were of a malicious and criminally fraudulent nature, ie a medium stacking tarot cards).
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
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...
but it's California, so they may be hard to find.
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.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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!"
So what about that "gets" you? Supernatural by definition needs not be observable. What gets me are the natural conclusions supposedly justified by this supernatural being, like that God considers homosexual behavior to be a sin (not to mention the concept of sin in the first place) or that humanity can continue to multiply exponentially because God will end the game before too many people become a serious problem.
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.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
but I have seen it work a couple of times
No, you didn't. He either already knew there was water there or he just guessed and happened to be correct (hint: underground water isn't exactly uncommon near fields). If he could actually do it (read: if he is skilled at the arcane arts and sorcery), he should take up the Great Randi's challenge and win himself a cool million.
A single locating flag wire bent at an angle works EVERY time for buried infastructure. Some use two wires, but I use one. It works every freaking time. Not sometimes, not occasionally, every time. I can find gas lines, water lines, sewer lines, co-axial lines, you name it and it is buried it can be found using witching sticks. The main problem is that you can not identify what you pick up while locating, which is why I then confirm the locate with some other source such as an map or line locator.
But the main point is that it works.
... 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.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
... look up Water Witch in Google Play.
It's free.
If you download it in the next 15 minutes, it's ABSOLUTELY free.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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 efficiency/pollution whereby anything under 100 gallons/hr. can easily be cost efficient. Anything beyond that has to this point, cost more than importing it. San Diego's DeSal is attempting to create a new break point @ the high-end of production however (2 million gallons per hour) and it remains to be seen if it will work. Source
2) Supply & Demand When it rains, why spend money on desalination when you get it from the sky? As California's Jerry Brown once stated: "When it rains here in California, it might as well be raining money." Jerry Brown, 1982.
The biggest concerns from the EPA about Desalination technologies come down to what happens to the brine sludge byproducts and the cost to run. Well, San Diego's option is actually rather efficient and its cost only slightly higher than importing water. A cost we can live with, but the fight continues on another front! The sludge has become the new controversy that the EPA and PETA girls are all upset about.
Right now, most desal plants average about ~1 metric ton of sludge per ~12 million litres of fresh drinking water. So what happens to it?
- Australia, Africa, Saudi Arabia and the UK bury it.
- Ghana, Egypt, Nigeria and a few other African nations with Oil reserves are using it as part of their Oil extraction method
- USA, Japan and Greece currently use it for industrial use as soda ash and sodium bicarbinate
- Japan and Australia are currently looking to use it for cement compound, bricks and building materials
In summary, it certainly is NOT pumped back into the Ocean as much as it was even 5 years ago, but the EPA is still "concerned". We just cannot seem to win. Another technology being deployed RIGHT NOW will actually make use of it... ALL of it. WaterFX, a new company on the scene (relatively) has a solution to the amount of sludge that results in 93% of the water becoming palatable. With only 7% byproduct being "sludge salt", it is converted directly into Soda ash and Sodium Bicarbonate and used for: Fire extinguishers, Cooking, Neutralization of acids and bases, Medical uses, Personal hygiene, Cleaning agents, Biopesticides, Cattle feed supplements, Glass making, Pool chemicals, Water softeners, Laundry detergents and a ton of other uses.
None the less, we have to drudge through the political process to get anything done here in California, which unfortunately will take years.
It would be interesting to see if drilling randomly in 3 other places on the property also generated water at around 70 feet. It could very well be that the property just sits on a lot of shallow water.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
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.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
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.
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.
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?
"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?
"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)."
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?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
My grandparents had a dowser site their well. apparently all of the natural springs on their land wasn't enough of a clue that water was not hard to get.
Okay, but what are the odds of randomly drilling and finding water? Or consulting a geologist instead of a wizard? As others have noted, Ireland isn't exactly the Sahara, it wouldn't be too unusual to find water.
The Amazing Randy has $1 million waiting for you to come and claim. You fucking liar.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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 locate an electrical line and it'll kill someone.
i cant believe that a site filled with people who laugh at the idea of a magical supreme being would have so many pro magical water-finding stick comments.
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 woke up the next morning, thus proving that my patented snake oil ensures you will not die in your sleep the night of your consuming it.
if there is any scientific validity to dowsing, its likely to do with the person themselves and some kind of instinct based on environmental and physiological factors. similar to how animals are able to sense earthquakes or storms before we do.
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 big joke on the city slickers, but humored him, and let him witch the well. He had a forked stick, and walked around for 30 minutes with it. He said "drill here. at 60 feet, you'll get 10gpm, but keep going to 80. At 80, you'll get 20gpm". We offered him money, and he said this was a gift from God, and he refused any sort of payment.
When the drilling rig showed up, they asked where we wanted to drill. Keep in mind that there are no maps, no charts, *nothing* to tell you where to dig. The guy with the truck will always suggest a spot; the one with the easiest access for his giant truck. So we drilled where the old man suggested. The driller shrugged his shoulders when we told him to keep drilling when he hit good water at 60 feet; he gets paid by the foot, regardless of water output. We got 20gpm at 80 feet (I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was within a foot or tow, and a gallon or two).
20 years later, my folks built another house on the property. They got the well witched again. It was a different guy, but a very similar story. "Gift from God, no payment". Accurate prediction of depth and volume of water.
If I didn't see it myself, I'd call bullshit.
That said, I'm sure there's a million scammers out the now.
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.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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.
Gas lines, water lines, sewer lines, coaxial lines, electric lines can all be found with a minimum of effort without witching sticks. All you have to do is go to a random spot, any old spot, it doesn't even have to be within 1000 miles of a human settlement, and dig. If you do not hit one of the above, you will at the very least cut the only fiber connection to an entire continent.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Yes, with this technology, you can also detect if a woman's pregnant, find out if she's a virgin, find buried treasure, expell evil spirits, and pleasure the gods until they make it rain. People have told me it works in all of these cases so it must be true.
Generally if a dowsing attempt succeeds, people will write posts bragging about it all over the Internet. If it fails, they're not inclined to write posts about being unlucky suckers.
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).
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
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 that out.
John
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.
I tried it as a skeptic, but its hard to deny what happens in your own hands. It was demonstrated by someone who works in archeology and is highly respected in her field with a track record of finding buried structures (roman villas, neolithic burials etc).
Ignoring or ridiculing an observable phenomenon because you have no explanation. Even though that ridicule has precluded any sort of mainstream scientific study. Is pretty unscientific IMO.
Superposition or the simultaneous wave/particle properties of light sound pretty batshit to the layman. But im glad they are being investigated enough to at least present hypotheses to test.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
I call bull on your story - finding water in Ireland is simply a matter of looking out the window (ie: Right now it is raining, and It seems like it is always raining). That's why the country is so green - the West gets even more rain than the East. I suspect that if you dig almost anywhere and you will hit water sooner or later - it's just a matter of how deep. Also, how far was he walking? Unless the distance was substantial, it probably didn't matter where you dig.
The start of burning man was delayed by rain.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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.
Okay, I'm a geologist. It happens that I live in an intermontane basin filled with alluvium, and I know the water table is about 30 feet down at my location. If I were so inclined, I could take a couple of wires or a willow stick, walk around a bit for show, then "find" a place. I'd tell you to dig 30 feet and you'll find water - and I'd be right. The knowledge this takes is not that hard to acquire, especially if you want to work in a specific region. I suspect many of the "professional" water dowsers are simply doing that and making a buck from credulous buyers. That said, I have seen people do some freaky things with dowsing rods. As a scientist I have to doubt any mystical source, but I admit having had a few WTF moments courtesy of one old fellow I used to know. He would find ore veins - where I knew they actually were, and he couldn't have because I hadn't shared my survey findings. But guess what? Ore veins do affect both the magnetic and gravitational fields. I don't completely discount an ability by some people to detect that - after all, some birds apparently do.
The world is my oyster. That's why it's always in a stew.
There is exactly one surefire way to create rain, it works flawlessly every time:
Wash your car.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In all fairness, 200 years ago Americans were smart enough to not settle in the middle of the bloody desert.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Global warming denial meets conspiracy theory.
I feel like in some weird, cheesy DC-Marvel crossover comic...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Dowsing, astrology, homeopathy, whenever anything like this comes up I always find it scary to see the angry response that comes from "science" people. It's as if they feel threatened somehow like their gods had been insulted. If they truly thought the subject was worthless they would just ignore it and not even bother to get into the debate.
When I worked in an IT company in Johannesburg one of the kernel developers there used to get extra money finding water for farmers. Not sticks or wands, what he did was get a brick and stand it upright on the palm of his hand. He would walk around and interpret the water course according to the brick's movements. I have no idea how or why it worked but he was getting paid regularly.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
There was no control group, I just 'felt' those locations were correct.
Now, I would love to be in the same situation again and test it out. I can afford to spend some cash and see the results if I need to do this again.
It was lucky guessing the first time, but again, my question is how the heck do you set something like this up for an honest review.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
ok, I get the idea of pick 3 spot's random, and dowse for 3. But what about depth to find water. Last time it was just 3 hours and boom I had water.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Quick, make a kickstarter campaign!
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
"Yes, with this technology, you can also detect if a woman's pregnant,"
Oh, you silly genetically-defective types that can't detect a woman in heat.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"Found 3 spots that felt just right, drilled the first, and found water at 70 feet."
Protip: Once you go past about 40 feet you're firmly in water-storing territory. Just about anyone drilling that far will find water underneath if you're anywhere near an area that has flood plains, aquifers, and such in the area.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
it is possible to scientifically test dowsing, it would just be expensive and scientists have already decided that dowsing is BS and don't want to do the research to prove it.
All you have to do is have a dowser go out and do his/her thing. Where they indicate there is water, dig. Also, dig 10 or 20 other random holes and figure out if there is water within about the same depth. Repeat about 100 times at different geologically separated and diversified areas. Shouldn't cost more than 10 or 20 million to put this to bed one way or another.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Too many people making Orgonite and clearing the sky of clouds and chemtrails.
Or just 50 cents worth of common sense.
problem with something like your asking it cost a lot to drill. figure 100 to 200 a drilling. so 900 for a test ... Now I can see why no one want to test
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Sure, that's why no individual bothers to do it, but if the world at large wanted to demonstrate if there was any merit at all to dowsing, that's the kind of thing they ought to test.
You'd think somewhere there'd be one wealthy investor willing to spend a few tens of thousands to scientifically analyze this.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
The traditional method is to use a forked stick, so it isn't a magnetic field. If it works (and I've seen comments for and against), it works by making it easy for some sort of subconscious feeling trigger something observable. This would mean that there are some perceptions that get processed unconsciously to make the whatever move or jump. At this point, I'm leaving it to somebody else to figure out what perceptions those could be.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If dowsing did work, why do you think scientists would necessarily investigate? There's lots of stories that tend to be overlooked by science (typically for good reasons). Now, it doesn't cost much to get some equipment to check out haunted houses, so amateurs can do it. It would be very expensive to test properly, as somebody would have to get enough land and drill both dowsed spots and control spots.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Common sense isn't always right. I don't see a good mechanism, but I'm not going to assume dowsing won't work without a decent study. Currently, I figure it's an interesting story with some not-particularly-convincing evidence, but I have no actual need to either believe it works or believe it doesn't.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
It's a groping *or* a rapey scan, usually. You make it sound like there's something unseemly!
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Dude, I have the experience too, and don't really want to believe it or to make up pseudo-scientific reasons why it works, but it does. Come on over to the house, I'll stick a couple bent copper wires in your hands and let you do it. Although I have seen one or two people that really don't get it/do it, most everyone else in the world can.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.