Well, some of us conjecture that there is ID in the global system, and that it is under the direction of itself -- Gaia, mother nature, Terra, what-have-you. The design is carried out by microbes, including bacteria and viruses. The overall design is based on some geologically long-term growth & homeostatic cycles, is expressed in some system-wide synergy that is analagous to slow intelligence, and we're a stage in the design. Think of yourself as a specialized cell in a large body.
Just conjecture, mind you, completely unprovable at this point, much like ID in general. At least as much fun a conjecture, I think--unless you have an inflated view of your own importance.
Even though Mac hardware provides you much less bang for the buck than the PC, I've been very impressed with what I've seen of OSX and am seriously tempted to buy an overpriced iBook/PowerBook to get the realdeal.
Hm. I've been shopping for notebooks and pricing out a Dell Inspiron vs. a PowerBook. Pretty much even, if you ask me, a $200 difference when configured nearly the same, the 1.6GHz Pentium M is better for some heavy lifting and has a faster bus, the 1.5GHz g4 is fine for video editing etc. The build quality / design of the PowerBook rules, and it has firewire on board, does things like target disk mode and IP over firewire. Scrolling trackpad, Bluetooth 2, Sudden Motion Sensor, a much better graphics card. The Dell is more expensive if I don't take advantage of a time-sensitive discount.
"Bang for the buck" means more than cpu horsepower.
My 400 MHz G3 iMac (with 1 GB RAM and 40 GB HD) is still running MacOS 9.2.2. It would barely run Tiger. And Tiger would break my old UMax scanner.
My home machine is a G3 500 iMac w/ 1GB RAM and 80GB HD. It has been running Panther nonstop since it was last updated to.7, a few months. It has on average 5 or 6 apps always running and sometimes multiple users are logged in. It runs filters in Photoshop while surfing/. and checking mail and listening to tunes and running Azureus. It isn't super swift while doing all that but it is capable with all that RAM. It runs FCP 3 just fine and even AfterEffects putts along.
I could upgrade but why bother? I have nice machines at work and it has no fan and takes up very little space, while doing what I ask. And about your scanner: see if Vuescan will work.
I also run Panther on an old G3 iBook: 366MHz, and a 5400 RPM HD, w/ 8MB of VRAM and 368MB of RAM. It's FINE for admin and some image stuff (I use it for scanning, layout, and presentations on the road), the processor chokes on high bandwidth apps like AfterEffects, not the OS.
I remember when a 400MHz G3 was great for video post. It still works, just not for pros.
they said to delete the entire preferences folder in my Library.
Second Last Resort Alert! Caution!
Generally it's better to track when crashes are happening (e.g. an app startup or when accessing a drive or completely random). Random indicates RAM, often... I have a flaky ATA card that I discovered due to watching when the crashes happened, during access of a set of drives. Often Mail.app protests my abuse and corrupts the preferences file, stalling out, requiring a force quit. Deleting the preferences file of apps doing that usually works. Resetting everything can be a real pain in the neck, though, so backup before you remove a preferences folder.
My troubleshooting method: follow the signal path.
check your head
check that cards, fans etc. are seated and working
check your cables and connections
check your system configurations and repair permissions
No. OS 9 worked just fine with lesser quality RAM, so that when many of us upgraded older machines to OS X, kaput. Blue & White G3's were nasty about it, starting up to a blank screen and needing voodoo like resetting the motherboard. I'm not enough of a hardware geek to be sure exactly why OS X is more fussy, but it has to to with timing, I believe.
If it's your whole machine that's crashing (i.e. kernel panic) then look to bad or under-spec RAM first, not the OS. OS X machines are very particular about RAM.
The only practical way to do so is to alter the birth rate....And one of the best ways to lower birth rates is to raise living standards and give people access to modern medical care (including contraceptives).
Very true, and thank you for pointing out that violent attrition is useless. Most (including this thread so far) gloss over the fact that human culture, economy, and society complicate the biological aspects immeasurably. There is no simple answer.
There are aggregates of answers that address various factors that stand a good chance of solving malthusian problems when taken together. Essentially, it seems that solutions like
elevated standard of living with decreased disparity
frugal consumption patterns
whole-cost accounting in all activities
family planning
innovative and systems-oriented land-use design and norms
significant cultural shifts
better education levels overall, w/ attention to these problems
regional economic diversification and self-reliance levels
a whole systems-aware approach to efficiency
much better understanding of ecological patterns
all need to be implemented, and soon, to manage to keep away a serious global malthusian crisis, where shortages will not be merely regional and politically unsolved.
All the examples I list are interrelated. Many solutions are relatively simple in theory but difficult given economic momentum etc., such as designing car-free urban environments, or decreasing meat consumption. Some are going to be so tough (like whole-cost accounting) that I don't see them being done in time.
The primary fulcrum for much of the problem seems to me to be in the cultural shift, the rules governing semi-conscious choices. Move the people, and the governments and corps will follow. Actually, I hope that's wrong, since the fate of the world would rest with teachers, artists, and religious authority.
The city on Caprica in the pilot was Simon Fraser University.
SFU was used for all kinds of SF shows. It was the FBI headquarters on the X-Files, that always makes me chuckle. My favourite was watching it get pummeled by a Goa'uld bombardment in Stargate's season six.
Arthur Erickson is a well loved/despised modernist architect who plays with massive spaces. I have a friend who calls it archetorture. He gets to design some pretty trippybuildings and spaces.
Floating clocks and weather forcasts? WTF?... Is Dashboard/Kornfabulator really anything more than a pretty toy?
Yes, really. I get to work in the morning and bring up Konfabulator with a hot key, and while I'm unloading my bag I can glance at a big clock and calendar on the screen from across the room, then sit down and get the weather forecast so I can plan field work (no windows!), check the ferry lineup in the webcam frame, glance over my iCal to-do list, note any active network connections as well as network & cpu loads, and check a couple of RSS feeds. On one screen, with one key. Then it goes away with one key.
Yes, I think Konfabulator is worth it, even for the ridiculous load it puts on an old processor. It saves a huge amount of time and after a few years, I'm addicted. Between using Konf and Quicksilver I've been sampling the gui of the future. But, it was just a warm-up to Dashboard, as far as I'm concerned. I think the free widget community is going to come up with some very interesting uses.
do they still not have support for multiple workspaces
I use both Expose and Desktop Manager to organise the 8-15 apps and dozens of windows I have open at any one time. DM is alpha, and a bit quirky but functional and hasn't crashed yet. It's GPL'd and runs as a standalone app, with some acqualicious interface elements. I'm using it with the four desktops it came prefigured with. Took a couple of minutes to find, download, install, and begin using.
FWIW, I'd be surprised if OS X got this feature soon. It's cluttery (like my real world desk) and not a very Apple kind of aesthetic. I'd rather they left some workflow interface things up to 3rd party variation, anyway. Look at how good Quicksilver is as an interface enhancement, for instance, or Pathfinder. I do wish Apple would loosen up the interface, and give us skinning options and things like replacing Finder.
the Escort was one of the only somewhat-good cars Ford ever made
That's why I bought my second one. Body designed by Mazda, and I think the engine was euro-Ford designed. Best mileage for station wagons in the mid-90's. Now I can park my 'foreign' car in the parking lot at the autoworker's union and no-one gives me dirty looks!
I don't think your post is off-topic, since this story is partly about the difference between two systems.
We could all learn a lot more about each other if we got rid of these attitudes and spent a little time getting to know one another's countries.
As other posters have noted, us Canucks mostly live within a couple of hours of the border. We flinch everytime the US dollar goes up or down, and an hour's lineup at the border can threaten bankruptcy to many. Many of us have relatives across the border. We grew up on USA's broadcast and print media. We're indoctrinated with USisms, and (consciously or not) resent it, resist it, and argue over it.
You couldn't really have a show lampooning Canadian ignorance of the USA, but it is a no-brainer to do the reverse (a pretty popular show, too).
Essentially, Canadians know way more than Americans about the other side of the border, care more, and are subject to what happens down there. This is natural due to simple demographic pressures, but it is also due to a near-colonial relationship... thus the resentments.
Yes, we're more liberal in some respects than most States, but not in all respects. There's a greater emphasis on the commons and public interest, and it shows up in the laws. Sometimes it works out, like in fair use, and sometimes it's maddeningly misdirected or backwards. It's still parliament under a monarchy, after all.
I agree, the US is a much better country than prevailing attitudes would have you believe...for some. Really, a tour through downtown Detroit, parts of Chicago, etc. is an education on the American System. Then again, most canucks have never seen a reservation in their lives, and know little about our own racist legacies.
regarding point #2, i asked if being "right wing" was intrinsically bad. it apparently isn't.
Um. Perhaps they suddenly realized who they were talking to, then got polite, so as to not imply that there was, um, anything intrinsically wrong with you. Just sayin'.
apparently the president should never use "God" in a speech.
Well, a lot of people can't get that "crusade" plum that he dropped way back in '02 out of their heads. It's an emotional thing. Bad optics, you know. Too bad about all the children though. Still, it can't be helped, doing G-d's work.
True. It's also true that many mac users spoof their browser, to avoid being shut out of websites that whine about incompatibility.
Installed user base was up at 55 million at one point in the late 90's... I wonder what it is now. Apple's always had a problem with users who won't upgrade, because the old clunker still works fine... and even though anything over 6 years old is going to be a real slug on the intarwebthing, if it doesn't break down (and yes, there are plenty of OS 8.x and 9.x machines that still don't crash all the time) people will put up with that, especially if they're on dialup.
You're right, he should be right up there among the giants. Usually only experts recognise Olaf... and even fewer realize that about 40% of the common SF themes that we still see rehashed owe a great deal to Stapledon. That apparent debt includes writers like Clarke (e.g. Childhood's End).
Too bad the guy wasn't a better writer. His epic books are mostly compressed collections of myriad plots and themes on a cosmic scale. What an imagination!
Some of us are better at being auto-didacts, and teach ourselves relentlessly no matter what. In that case, taking time to de-school yourself and explore the hands-on world of finding biosurvival tickets like money and being evaluated on the actual use-value of your products will provide necessary perspective. That perspective will allow the inquiring mind to plan a course of university study that doesn't waste endless hours and dollars.
On the other hand, some of us need peer involvement and impassioned discourse in order to learn effectively. In that case, post-secondary school of any kind offers the exploratory environment that will help you discover your true interests, and so long as you don't expect a vocation, there'll be no time wasted. Just seek out the ones who take the curriculum further than required.
I personally jumped into university at 16 due to parental prodding, took way too many drugs in 2nd year, dropped out, partied 'til it was out of my system, then went to work in the bush where I couldn't spend any money and spent the evenings with obscure but important books and notepads. Then I took the savings and travelled alone around the globe for 18 months on a shoestring, working as I went--all very good decisions for my education (except for the exceess part).
In grad school, I learned more from my peers than from the curriculum. All my tech and creative skills (the vocational stuff) were gathered from experience. YMMV.
That's true no matter what: if it has copy protection, it won't have the Compact Disc logo on it, because it isn't a true CD, merely a shiny disc that pretends.
In the states this is a big issue and I agree it is morally wrong however where I live, in Canada, it's a bit different. I pay a levy on all my blank media to prop up the dying recording giants. I figure if I'm going to have to pay them so I can back up my hard drive and burn linux distro ISOs then I'm going to get a little something from them. You can try to argue this point with me all you wish, but if I'm giving them money for essentially nothing then I want something in return.
Don't forget that as a levy-burdened Canajun you have the right to lend CD's etc. to your friend, and borrow theirs, and copy or rip them as you see fit. This behaviour in my peers has a viral marketing effect that counters most loss of sales... for the rest, there's the levy. Of course, you can download shared music as well, but that's spoiled by not being allowed to legally upload/distribute and the hassle of lousy P2P file quality.
The near-universal application of the levy burns my butt so much, sharing music has become more of a duty than a right... I didn't really copy off my friends much until I discovered I was paying for it anyway. It's casual sharing but enough to make light of the levy.
I'm pretty sure Randi's experimental method would scale well to locating 1000gallon tanks of water vs. empty tanks (or water being pumped down a large bore pipe vs. a series of empty pipes), but then you're talking a great expense for testing.... Self delusion, not willful attempts to delude others, are the most powerful forces at work in dowsing (as well as faith healing, theraputic touch, homeopathy, etc.).
Well, I pretty much agree with you, and I don't offer any causal explanation, but in at least one situation self-delusion has been very beneficial to me.
I was renting a rural house and a scheduled visit from the septic pump guy (nice job, that) was happening the next day, so I started digging a shallow hole where I thought the tank was. Several hours later the yard looked like a cluster bomb had gone off: shallow holes everywhere. I reached a point of despair, and, despite never having seen dowsing performed but once on TV, went and got a coat hanger, cut it in half, bent it into L-shapes, and went out into the yard.
It blew my mind. I was able to map out the tank boundary within inches, as well as the pipes leading to and from it. I dug using those markers and there was no more wasted digging.
I haven't tried it since, and no-one saw me. I guessed at the time that what happened was that using a ritual like dowsing helped me use my intuition, which just sorted out what I'd failed to observe using a more rational technique. Still, it was spooky, registering strongly, and bizarrely accurate, so I don't hold fast to trying to explain it away, either. Something happened; it was far from random; it saved me many hours of labour; if it was self-delusion it had a significant physiological response. Anecdote, not datum, but dowsing etc. should be properly studied, and not by fundamentalist skeptics or dowser-types.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, some of us conjecture that there is ID in the global system, and that it is under the direction of itself -- Gaia, mother nature, Terra, what-have-you. The design is carried out by microbes, including bacteria and viruses. The overall design is based on some geologically long-term growth & homeostatic cycles, is expressed in some system-wide synergy that is analagous to slow intelligence, and we're a stage in the design. Think of yourself as a specialized cell in a large body.
Just conjecture, mind you, completely unprovable at this point, much like ID in general. At least as much fun a conjecture, I think--unless you have an inflated view of your own importance.
Hm. I've been shopping for notebooks and pricing out a Dell Inspiron vs. a PowerBook. Pretty much even, if you ask me, a $200 difference when configured nearly the same, the 1.6GHz Pentium M is better for some heavy lifting and has a faster bus, the 1.5GHz g4 is fine for video editing etc. The build quality / design of the PowerBook rules, and it has firewire on board, does things like target disk mode and IP over firewire. Scrolling trackpad, Bluetooth 2, Sudden Motion Sensor, a much better graphics card. The Dell is more expensive if I don't take advantage of a time-sensitive discount.
"Bang for the buck" means more than cpu horsepower.
My home machine is a G3 500 iMac w/ 1GB RAM and 80GB HD. It has been running Panther nonstop since it was last updated to .7, a few months. It has on average 5 or 6 apps always running and sometimes multiple users are logged in. It runs filters in Photoshop while surfing /. and checking mail and listening to tunes and running Azureus. It isn't super swift while doing all that but it is capable with all that RAM. It runs FCP 3 just fine and even AfterEffects putts along.
I could upgrade but why bother? I have nice machines at work and it has no fan and takes up very little space, while doing what I ask. And about your scanner: see if Vuescan will work.
I also run Panther on an old G3 iBook: 366MHz, and a 5400 RPM HD, w/ 8MB of VRAM and 368MB of RAM. It's FINE for admin and some image stuff (I use it for scanning, layout, and presentations on the road), the processor chokes on high bandwidth apps like AfterEffects, not the OS.
I remember when a 400MHz G3 was great for video post. It still works, just not for pros.
Second Last Resort Alert! Caution!
Generally it's better to track when crashes are happening (e.g. an app startup or when accessing a drive or completely random). Random indicates RAM, often... I have a flaky ATA card that I discovered due to watching when the crashes happened, during access of a set of drives. Often Mail.app protests my abuse and corrupts the preferences file, stalling out, requiring a force quit. Deleting the preferences file of apps doing that usually works. Resetting everything can be a real pain in the neck, though, so backup before you remove a preferences folder.
My troubleshooting method: follow the signal path.
No. OS 9 worked just fine with lesser quality RAM, so that when many of us upgraded older machines to OS X, kaput. Blue & White G3's were nasty about it, starting up to a blank screen and needing voodoo like resetting the motherboard. I'm not enough of a hardware geek to be sure exactly why OS X is more fussy, but it has to to with timing, I believe.
Ha! Touché!
If it's your whole machine that's crashing (i.e. kernel panic) then look to bad or under-spec RAM first, not the OS. OS X machines are very particular about RAM.
You can have:
- reliability/stability/security
- lots of choice
- bleeding-edge feature set and interface
But you must pick only two.Very true, and thank you for pointing out that violent attrition is useless. Most (including this thread so far) gloss over the fact that human culture, economy, and society complicate the biological aspects immeasurably. There is no simple answer.
There are aggregates of answers that address various factors that stand a good chance of solving malthusian problems when taken together. Essentially, it seems that solutions like
- elevated standard of living with decreased disparity
- frugal consumption patterns
- whole-cost accounting in all activities
- family planning
- innovative and systems-oriented land-use design and norms
- significant cultural shifts
- better education levels overall, w/ attention to these problems
- regional economic diversification and self-reliance levels
- a whole systems-aware approach to efficiency
- much better understanding of ecological patterns
all need to be implemented, and soon, to manage to keep away a serious global malthusian crisis, where shortages will not be merely regional and politically unsolved.All the examples I list are interrelated. Many solutions are relatively simple in theory but difficult given economic momentum etc., such as designing car-free urban environments, or decreasing meat consumption. Some are going to be so tough (like whole-cost accounting) that I don't see them being done in time.
The primary fulcrum for much of the problem seems to me to be in the cultural shift, the rules governing semi-conscious choices. Move the people, and the governments and corps will follow. Actually, I hope that's wrong, since the fate of the world would rest with teachers, artists, and religious authority .
Woah, doofus, CRIA is a bunch of capitalist overlords, eh, they're about as pinko commie as the RIAA.
Then 'justsomebody' tried to correct the examples.
Xerox Alto 1972
They didn't get it 'right'--at least not right enough to bring to market. The Mac made the GUI useable.
ARPANET 1969
The GP was referring to desktops and LANS, not workstations and big iron. Etc. with the rest of your response. Maybe you're being obtuse on purpose?
SFU was used for all kinds of SF shows. It was the FBI headquarters on the X-Files, that always makes me chuckle. My favourite was watching it get pummeled by a Goa'uld bombardment in Stargate's season six.
Arthur Erickson is a well loved/despised modernist architect who plays with massive spaces. I have a friend who calls it archetorture. He gets to design some pretty trippy buildings and spaces.
That's been fixed for a while. F8 is Konfabulator's friend now, and they stay out of the way.
Yes, really. I get to work in the morning and bring up Konfabulator with a hot key, and while I'm unloading my bag I can glance at a big clock and calendar on the screen from across the room, then sit down and get the weather forecast so I can plan field work (no windows!), check the ferry lineup in the webcam frame, glance over my iCal to-do list, note any active network connections as well as network & cpu loads, and check a couple of RSS feeds. On one screen, with one key. Then it goes away with one key.
Yes, I think Konfabulator is worth it, even for the ridiculous load it puts on an old processor. It saves a huge amount of time and after a few years, I'm addicted. Between using Konf and Quicksilver I've been sampling the gui of the future. But, it was just a warm-up to Dashboard, as far as I'm concerned. I think the free widget community is going to come up with some very interesting uses.
I use both Expose and Desktop Manager to organise the 8-15 apps and dozens of windows I have open at any one time. DM is alpha, and a bit quirky but functional and hasn't crashed yet. It's GPL'd and runs as a standalone app, with some acqualicious interface elements. I'm using it with the four desktops it came prefigured with. Took a couple of minutes to find, download, install, and begin using.
FWIW, I'd be surprised if OS X got this feature soon. It's cluttery (like my real world desk) and not a very Apple kind of aesthetic. I'd rather they left some workflow interface things up to 3rd party variation, anyway. Look at how good Quicksilver is as an interface enhancement, for instance, or Pathfinder. I do wish Apple would loosen up the interface, and give us skinning options and things like replacing Finder.
That's why I bought my second one. Body designed by Mazda, and I think the engine was euro-Ford designed. Best mileage for station wagons in the mid-90's. Now I can park my 'foreign' car in the parking lot at the autoworker's union and no-one gives me dirty looks!
We could all learn a lot more about each other if we got rid of these attitudes and spent a little time getting to know one another's countries.
As other posters have noted, us Canucks mostly live within a couple of hours of the border. We flinch everytime the US dollar goes up or down, and an hour's lineup at the border can threaten bankruptcy to many. Many of us have relatives across the border. We grew up on USA's broadcast and print media. We're indoctrinated with USisms, and (consciously or not) resent it, resist it, and argue over it.
You couldn't really have a show lampooning Canadian ignorance of the USA, but it is a no-brainer to do the reverse (a pretty popular show, too).
Essentially, Canadians know way more than Americans about the other side of the border, care more, and are subject to what happens down there. This is natural due to simple demographic pressures, but it is also due to a near-colonial relationship... thus the resentments.
Yes, we're more liberal in some respects than most States, but not in all respects. There's a greater emphasis on the commons and public interest, and it shows up in the laws. Sometimes it works out, like in fair use, and sometimes it's maddeningly misdirected or backwards. It's still parliament under a monarchy, after all.
I agree, the US is a much better country than prevailing attitudes would have you believe...for some. Really, a tour through downtown Detroit, parts of Chicago, etc. is an education on the American System. Then again, most canucks have never seen a reservation in their lives, and know little about our own racist legacies.
Um. Perhaps they suddenly realized who they were talking to, then got polite, so as to not imply that there was, um, anything intrinsically wrong with you. Just sayin'.
apparently the president should never use "God" in a speech.
Well, a lot of people can't get that "crusade" plum that he dropped way back in '02 out of their heads. It's an emotional thing. Bad optics, you know. Too bad about all the children though. Still, it can't be helped, doing G-d's work.
Then you could be properly labeled "obtuse."
True. It's also true that many mac users spoof their browser, to avoid being shut out of websites that whine about incompatibility.
Installed user base was up at 55 million at one point in the late 90's... I wonder what it is now. Apple's always had a problem with users who won't upgrade, because the old clunker still works fine... and even though anything over 6 years old is going to be a real slug on the intarwebthing, if it doesn't break down (and yes, there are plenty of OS 8.x and 9.x machines that still don't crash all the time) people will put up with that, especially if they're on dialup.
Too bad the guy wasn't a better writer. His epic books are mostly compressed collections of myriad plots and themes on a cosmic scale. What an imagination!
Some of us are better at being auto-didacts, and teach ourselves relentlessly no matter what. In that case, taking time to de-school yourself and explore the hands-on world of finding biosurvival tickets like money and being evaluated on the actual use-value of your products will provide necessary perspective. That perspective will allow the inquiring mind to plan a course of university study that doesn't waste endless hours and dollars.
On the other hand, some of us need peer involvement and impassioned discourse in order to learn effectively. In that case, post-secondary school of any kind offers the exploratory environment that will help you discover your true interests, and so long as you don't expect a vocation, there'll be no time wasted. Just seek out the ones who take the curriculum further than required.
I personally jumped into university at 16 due to parental prodding, took way too many drugs in 2nd year, dropped out, partied 'til it was out of my system, then went to work in the bush where I couldn't spend any money and spent the evenings with obscure but important books and notepads. Then I took the savings and travelled alone around the globe for 18 months on a shoestring, working as I went--all very good decisions for my education (except for the exceess part).
In grad school, I learned more from my peers than from the curriculum. All my tech and creative skills (the vocational stuff) were gathered from experience. YMMV.
That's true no matter what: if it has copy protection, it won't have the Compact Disc logo on it, because it isn't a true CD, merely a shiny disc that pretends.
Don't forget that as a levy-burdened Canajun you have the right to lend CD's etc. to your friend, and borrow theirs, and copy or rip them as you see fit. This behaviour in my peers has a viral marketing effect that counters most loss of sales... for the rest, there's the levy. Of course, you can download shared music as well, but that's spoiled by not being allowed to legally upload/distribute and the hassle of lousy P2P file quality.
The near-universal application of the levy burns my butt so much, sharing music has become more of a duty than a right... I didn't really copy off my friends much until I discovered I was paying for it anyway. It's casual sharing but enough to make light of the levy.
Well, I pretty much agree with you, and I don't offer any causal explanation, but in at least one situation self-delusion has been very beneficial to me.
I was renting a rural house and a scheduled visit from the septic pump guy (nice job, that) was happening the next day, so I started digging a shallow hole where I thought the tank was. Several hours later the yard looked like a cluster bomb had gone off: shallow holes everywhere. I reached a point of despair, and, despite never having seen dowsing performed but once on TV, went and got a coat hanger, cut it in half, bent it into L-shapes, and went out into the yard.
It blew my mind. I was able to map out the tank boundary within inches, as well as the pipes leading to and from it. I dug using those markers and there was no more wasted digging.
I haven't tried it since, and no-one saw me. I guessed at the time that what happened was that using a ritual like dowsing helped me use my intuition, which just sorted out what I'd failed to observe using a more rational technique. Still, it was spooky, registering strongly, and bizarrely accurate, so I don't hold fast to trying to explain it away, either. Something happened; it was far from random; it saved me many hours of labour; if it was self-delusion it had a significant physiological response. Anecdote, not datum, but dowsing etc. should be properly studied, and not by fundamentalist skeptics or dowser-types.