Slashdot Mirror
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...
...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?
just your county? that employee is a canary. you should feel bad for the whole country.
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!"
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?
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 ]
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.
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.