Reminds me of the debate at my university when I tried to declare my computer as my "instrument."
"That's not REAL music." I changed schools, eventually changed majors.. but now the place that rejected my computer now has a "music technology" degree.
editing to say that music that wasn't real went on to be a massive genre - hard to put "creativity / art" in a box.
What do you think about this device? I bought an iPhone SE and dropped it onto the rug in my living room and it broke so bad it won't even come on. I'm never buying another all-glass phone again.
I checked out the specs on this phone - I'd love to hear what you think about it.
If we're talking about the XCover Pro, I drop it fairly regularly (not intentionally, just clumsy), and I've yet to break the screen. The reinforced edges seem to do the trick, they've gathered a collection of dings and scratches, but the device is overall in surprisingly great shape, coming up on three years of ownership. I expect it to last a few more years at the very least. The first thing to go will probably be the security updates, but as an "enterprise" device, it should hold out a bit longer. It currently gets quarterly security updates, see https://security.samsungmobile.com/workScope.smsb
My grandfather was a "well witcher" (Appalachian roots here). Many believe that's woo woo or some kind of super power. The man was incredibly intelligent and resourceful and he had a reputation for finding water every single time he dropped the drill into the ground.
When I was a kid I used to go to sleep listening to stories of my dad and his dad driving around on a 2 ton truck with a 3 ton drill and how the brakes always went out. Somehow they always lived to tell the tale.
Haven't thought about this in a long time. Good memories.
My dad drilled water wells in the US after spending many years working on oil wells overseas. His clients would often hire witchers (water witches, water witchers, well witches - I think the distance from Appalachia to Montana clouded the specific vocabulary). You'd have this very old man dodder around the property with a pair of sticks, and when the sticks magically chose to pull together and cross, that's where you'd dig the well.
I do not recall whether the magical approach was any more successful than the traditional approach.
In most cases you can drill just about anywhere and find water. So any approach from random to looking at geological features (which you can gather from seismograph data, if needed set off an explosion in controlled locations...) will find water. The latter approach may find a specific place where a less deep well can work, but in most locations there isn't that much a difference (at least not among the reasonable places to drill your well - if you are willing to pay for miles of pipe you can maybe have a useful choice of location).
When I built my house in the country, the well driller insisted on witching. He said "we should drill right here." I said "No, move it 100 feet that way. Your spot is right in the middle of my future driveway."
"I can't guarantee we'll hit water there" he said.
Finding & Buying Your Place in the Country has a whole section on wells. The main key seems to be onsite when it is drilled, because otherwise they'll just leave after drilling one, even if it is dry.
When I was about 12 my dad wanted to do some work plumbing in the house but couldn’t find the stopcock to turn off the water. Figuring it was buried somewhere in the hedge he got me to dowse for the water line with a couple of bent coat hangers.
Waking back and forth across the front lawn the bent coat hangers crossed consistently along a line so he started digging. Unfortunately the pipe he holed with the garden fork was the gas supply and the day ended with the gas company coming around to patch the line. I don’t think we ever found the water stopcock.
Though we can’t explain it dowsing does seem to work. There is however no guarantee that what you find is what you were looking for…
I mean statistics may, if someone spent enough time, show that things are generally where they feel best being because a human like you put it there. also you have about a 50% give or take winning anything so leaving it to odds feels better than trying to push one way or another.
I consider myself a pretty cynical person, but I tried it myself to prove someone else wrong and I couldn't help but feel like it actually worked.
We were looking for a water pipe, not just sitting groundwater. The only explanation I could come up with was that for some reason a magnetic field was being created by the pipe underground. I don't remember if the water was flowing or not when we did it.
I feel silly even commenting this, but we truly did find the pipe exactly where I was standing when the rods pointed together.
Of course it's very possible that I unconsciously tilted my hands in the spot where I suspected the pipe would be. Even though I did make a conscious effort to not do exactly that, I wonder if there is some psychological factor in the phenomenon.
Slightly tangential but I've found it insightful: there are studies, e.g. [0], showing correlations between lifespan and date of birth. Causal factors could include for example seasonal viral infections, lesser amount of vitamin D in the winter, etc.
Of course, this tells nothing about well-witching, but illustrates that at least some old beliefs aren't as unreasonable as one might think.
Even without evaluating the quality of the study, I don't have a hard time accepting the notion that the season of your birth may affect your average lifespan by a few months. It is a very modest claim.
The claims of astrologers are not at all like this. They are vastly more specific.
Okay granted; my intent wasn't to justify astrology either, but merely to encourage prudence when dismissing "old ideas." To be clear, I'm not talking about modern astrology, but really about old beliefs that could have been built on repeated observations, but weirdly/poorly phrased.
In The Republic of Plato, there's this idea of rotation between political regimes[0], and it's explained by the way each generation treats the next one. Down to Earth example: think of overprotecting parents making their child unprepared for an ordinary adult life.
Now of course, this is again distant from the discourse of our favorite astrologers, but if you squint a little, there are conceptual similarities.
Thinking about it a little more, and on point to your original remark, I wonder if the fact that a considerable amount of people like to believe in astrology isn't tied to the same instinct that made old people personify everything and anything as Gods: a strong tendency to see order and intelligence in chaos.
After all, science is still about doing just this, minus the anthropomorphism. So, not so shocking: just human nature at works.
While I don't think this particular wikipedia page is especially concise, I do think it's a great jumping off point for links you will find interesting:
I first learned about the link between temporal lobe epilepsy and hyperreligiosity from Robert Sapolsky's Biology and Human Behavior. From your comments I think you'd find it as interesting as I did.
A Facebook friend was talking about how overwhelming and chaotic her life has been feeling lately and people were chiming in to say they were in the same boat and attributing it to the Mercury retro-whatever.
Must just be a coincidence that it's back-to-school season and everyone is transitioning out of their summer routines into school-mode.
Might not have been dowsing but a geoelectric survey of the inductive/capacitive/resistive variety. The BBC Time Team folks occasionally use these for non invasive surveys. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU9aRZK4j84&t=663s
In The Traveller's Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor, a travelogue from the Caribbean, he gives an account of water divination. He initially sees it as some voodoo myth, and is taken aback when they repeatedly find water.
Ok, if I point at a random spot in the ground in an area that generally has water, and I said, "dig here and you will find water", and you put 1/5 a mile of pipe down into the earth and water comes up, am I some type of miracle? Would those people work in the desert? I think it's a lotto ticket that always wins.
I think there is a more functional and charitable read of this: not all of our senses are plumbed all the way through to our conscious mind at all times. small little hints (like minor changes in smell, relative humidity, maybe just pattern-matching on the lay of the land) are down in the noise, and pulling out your trusty sticks gives your subconscious a way to send a signal to your awareness.
Kinda like acupuncture - does my pulse really have seven levels that mean different things? I doubt it.. but a successful acupuncturist might still be able to diagnose "what hurts" using said technique, when really they've already picked up on other clues from your gait, posture, etc.
"subliminal" and "subconscious" are over-used and vague words, but we've all had the experience of wearing a new clothing item and receiving an uncommon number of compliments, including from strangers who wouldn't know it's new. I've always assumed we are unconsciously presenting the new thing with a bit of flair, and that equally-unconsciously draws the eye.
You have to be careful of what you mean by "does it actually work".
Does the dowsing find water hidden in a random spot or is the dowser tapping into subconscious knowledge about the land to find it. The parent is talking about the latter.
Look up "Ideomotor phenomenon" in your source. It's right above the pseudoscience bit.
It's not like subconscious knowledge must be valid subconscious knowledge. The ideomotor phenomenon is an expression of internal belief, which may be little different than a wild-ass guess.
There's no evidence that the dowser is tapping into subconscious knowledge in a way that gives results any better than - or different from - chance.
These people do work in the desert. I have a buddy that drills wells here in Arizona and he WILL NOT put a drill into the ground without a Witcher. I have a really hard time with "witching" from a logical POV, but my buddy and his $130k truck/equipment swear by it. I call that putting your money where your mouth is.
The test would be finding a spot where a witcher says there isn't water, and then drilling there.
There's water almost everywhere in the ground -- the questions are is there enough of it to meet the need? is it usable (ie: not contaminated with salt or toxic chemicals)?
the depth of the water table is fairly well known throughout the world, and it is not like a series of underwater rivers which are easily missed; the water table is called a "table" because it is very large and very flat.
if you are within 100 miles of a natural body of water, or in a flood plain, or anywhere that it rains semi-regularly, drilling will get you to a source of water.
Or as I suspect like where I grew up, if you dig down far enough you will hit water. The professional guys there would just ask "where do you want it?" and 99% of the time there was water there and not that far down.
Not GP but I also have severe reflux - I've had it years. It's been really bad lately.
In related information I've found that fortified yogurt helps not only my reflux but also improves my mood. But it never seemed to be enough to actually solve the reflux problem.
Just ordered the supplements. Truly hope this solves the problem.
Whoa I just realized that I have a hiatal hernia too. I didn't realize that's what that was. I hope this is a day of solutions!
My personal opinion (backed up with a certain amount of experience) is that much of these suicides are due to a soldier being traumatized, then coming home to try to cope with trauma responses. Some then turn to drowning the trauma with alcohol and other bad stuff. That's when the spiral really accelerates.
Unfortunately the stigma you mentioned feels so much worse when someone also hates themselves. They don't recognize the stigma for what it is and start believing they don't deserve to get better.
And yes this seems to be a huge problem across humanity. Overdoses and suicides are at historically high levels. And celebrities with tremendous resources still suffer the same way. Which tells me the technology just isn't there.
No question military experience can be extremely traumatic even without exposure to combat. People vary greatly in "resilience", some are very sensitive to trauma but may have no way to know that about themselves before encountering the damaging situations.
Thing is mental health conditions in general are a huge problem: "Neuropsychiatric disorders are the leading cause of disability in the United States, accounting for 18.7% of all years of life lost to disability and premature mortality." [0] The numbers vary in different countries/regions but the prevalence of such disorders is still non-trivial.
In addition most people don't seek or get adequate treatment, I think stigma is a big factor contributing to making a bad situation worse.
The elements you talk about are certainly true. It really would be a major change for the better if technological advances could make a difference. Given the developments of the last few decades I wouldn't say it can't happen. IMO the jury's out on the question, conceivably research will eventually have something to offer.
I think this is a valuable contribution to this conversation. You have shown how drones are definitely being used in critical situations. I can't see why you're being downvoted. I always try to support comments that are being downvoted for the wrong reasons (in terms of the HN rules).
I’m glad you posted the follow up comment because I missed your point at first. But I can actually see your point, that maybe he’s making a political statement to avoid the more ugly truth.
It does sound like a hassle to be famous enough to get cancelled. I like the idea of niche fame, where you’re some huge fish in a tiny pond - just enough to make a living but not enough to get cancelled by the horde
"That's not REAL music." I changed schools, eventually changed majors.. but now the place that rejected my computer now has a "music technology" degree.
editing to say that music that wasn't real went on to be a massive genre - hard to put "creativity / art" in a box.