> “You can be on a public street and scan your suspect’s yard.”
Well, if that ain't a great way to manufacture a warrant.
What exactly is wrong with cadaver dogs, anyway? I'm guessing it's that cadaver dogs actually work on scientific principles. (Edit: dogs also can't smell a body from across the street. At least, I don't think they can.)
Cadaver dogs were used to locate the remains of murdered journalist Kim Wall, which were in plastic bags at the bottom of Køge Bay. I'm pretty sure smelling a body across the street wouldn't present a challenge. Dog noses are insane.
Your skepticism is unwarranted - it's real. There's a documentary about it. Small droplets of rotting fat float up to the surface, where the dog can smell it. They had to account for ocean currents and the rate at which the bubbles rise in order to sufficiently narrow the search area. They couldn't find it at first, because they misunderstood the mechanism and assumed it was gas bubbles, which obviously rise at a different rate.
Besides - where else would they have gotten the information from? She was killed on a submarine with no one else aboard but her murderer, and he wasn't talking.
There should be a discouraging compensation paid to the suspect if their property is searched and nothing found. An "apologies for your trouble / time", and of course a hearty compensation for any damage done.
Paid by whom? In cases of police getting sued after a wrongful death, the municipality typically pays the bill. The police budget is unaffected. In such a system there's little incentive for police departments to be careful with which property they search, even if the owner is compensated.
What happens if it becomes a “the body must’ve been here at some point and then moved”? For example cadaver dogs have been used on cars, houses, etc. with clearly no body precisely to put under suspicion that a body was under temporary storage.
Exactly. Someone suggested we compensate people who are searched when nothing is found. The next person says that would immediately be gamed. I'm saying it would only be gamed if dog searches don't work.
Personally, I would like to see some sort of registration before an animal or device is used for a search. A search would be invalid unless it is applied for. Then the results must be entered upon completion (or assumed to be a failed search). Then we could see the results and how accurate these animals or "scientific" tests are in practice.
Instead we have warrants essentially backed by dogs who have no track record. The police are allowed to say, "the dog alerted, so drugs must have been present at some point and must have been moved." This has even led to further searches for where the drugs were moved to. All without anyone knowing the actual accuracy or effectiveness of a dog's search ability -- only that it was "certified".
It gets worse than that actually. There was a case where a cadaver dog was well regarded for always being able to find something. This was because the owner kept shards of bone and said the dog found this bone shard at the search. In your record keeping this dog would have 100% success rate and “prove” cadaver dogs really work.
True, and that is a problem if peoples' properties get dug up, as a sibling comment notes. But, in contrast to drug dogs, where an alert creates probable cause for a search where things other than drugs can frequently be found, cadaver dogs typically either find remains or not. There generally isn't much else one can find digging around in the dirt that's incriminating, so, from a legal/justice POV, the harm of a false alert from a cadaver dog is much less than that from a false alert from a drug dog.
I heavily disagree with this notion. Cadaver dogs falsely alerting can tip police into arresting a suspect and bringing them in for questioning (this can often be newsworthy and cause one’s neighbors, community, the internet, and employment to also treat the person with suspicion or assume guilt) , or focusing on a suspect while not chasing other leads for an actual killer, or be used as circumstantial evidences at a trial even when no body is found. There have been cases where the cadaver dog alerts around a car, with clearly no body to be found, and this is used as circumstantial evidence that the car must’ve been used to carry a body.
This is one of the thoughts every now and then makes me happy to don't live in a society affine to the US culture, and sometimes I can't understand how people can't see how this messes everything up, this attitude of terminating the life of those who have just been suspected, by giving for granted that everyone is already guilty before the trial even starts is crazy, and makes the whole country more blackmailable, I can't imagine the amount of people who gave up to blackmail just because otherwise their life would be trashed
But to get back on point, what should the police do? They have an investigation to do and the dog trying to say something? Should we avoid questioning people just because society is fucked up?
More than rich I would say it’s an evangelical / Protestant trait, somehow. I’ve experienced it in London, and Amsterdam that are anyway still evangelical, but absolutely not in Spain or Italy that are catholic
I’m not sure I’m not a religious scholar not believer but have still received a catholic education being Italian (went to catholic private schools) and a lot of things that I absolutely hate are mostly explained by people I talk to with being a result of evangelical education
What do you think? Might it be more cultural than related to status?
According to [1], the fraction of the USA that is evangelical has been declining: it claims white evangelicals made up 13% of the US population in 2018, while Catholics were 22%, and people with no religion were 21%.
I am not sure that what I was talking about is directly related to a change in beliefs, I am not a catholic, but nonetheless a lot of my decisions are affected by the catholic doctrine, even by "muscle memory", because my point of view has developed within the context of this culture, so I am not sure that going from 50% of people associated with a cult to 18% makes the drop in how people behaves also so marked?
It's amazing that a dog smelling odors could be evidence of anything, even taken in the context of other evidence. In my view the dog is simply a tool to find evidence. The tool indicating there is evidence is not evidence.
That's kind of the problem. If the dog indicates there's evidence in a place you can't get to (private property, for instance), the dog's indications can be used as evidence to get a warrant.
Essentially if any of these powers were true, they could be reproduced in a scientific experiment and then reversed engineer on why they actually work.
There is even a foundation with 1 million dollar price for whoever proves to have paranormal abilities. No-one has ever been able to prove scientifically to have paranormal power and won the prize for decades.
I mean the one with the sticks should be really easy to study scientifically, just have a group of diviners with no prior knowledge of an area find the corpses or water or whichever. Simple to do, statistically sound, etc.
That said, I wouldn't use water as an example; I'm no geologist but I'm fairly sure you'll find water in most places if you dig deep enough, there's not going to be underground rivers that are very location specific for which you need divining so much.
There's has been a lot of research done on dowsing, over a period of hundred years. You will find studies pointing one way or another. But no smoking gun either way. Its has tapered off since the 80s, cause there's not much reason going on with a field of study that cant get anywhere in a hundred years of work. Scientificality it is pretty clear that divining is useless.
The tests that were done were with pipes buried in an area. The 'divinators' (I do not know how they are called in English, the ones that find water with a stick) agreed that the test is fair.
They did not find anything that wild be above statistically expected results.
I will add a source if I find it, but it is at least 20 years old
A theory I’ve heard is the value of dowsing might be that it is essentially random. If you ask a group of people to find something using their rational faculties, they’ll tend to restrict their search to certain areas... all of which other people will have already examined for similar reasons. Whereas the random nature of dowsing encourages people to search more broadly. Sometimes a random approach actually produces better results.
I've seen conjecture that there is a real science behind this, but it doesn't involve the sticks per-se. In order to use them, there must be a focus on the thing you desire to find. This creates a sort of meditative trance with the sticks as the "focus" when in reality, the meditation is freeing up the conscious mind to not ignore the very subtle signs of an area being disturbed.
The fact is that they do indeed find bodies this way. The chances of randomly digging up a body by pure guess are vanishingly rare. We're talking at most around 10 square feet (often just 4-5 square feet) while there are 43,560 per acre or 27,878,400 per square mile. Even if you buried 1000 bodies in that square mile, your chances of finding one would still be a fraction of a percent.
> Even if you buried 1000 bodies in that square mile, your chances of finding one would still be a fraction of a percent.
Only if burying a body left no trace.
I can spot where deer have pooped in my lawn because there's a tuft of greener grass. Digging a big hole and putting 150 pounds of flesh into it is going to change stuff that's likely visible to an experienced tracker.
If that's the mechanism, we should figure out ways of meditating that don't involve charlatans or $60k fake devices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651).
Athletes in particular spend ungodly sums on performance aids, many of which have no scientific basis -- but, if it helps the athlete get into a winning mindset, what grounds do you really have to tell them to stop?
Athletes don't have the power to detain, arrest, or shoot me.
If the local football player wants to use a dowsing rod in search of treasure, go for it. If the local cops want to dig up my backyard because they got a hit off one, they can fuck off.
Athletes that win spend ungodly sums on performance aids which have scientific basis, however getting caught would get them disqualified so they will pretend to have other tricks up their sleeves. For the police this is called parallel construction where they use some highly illegal means to get information and then hire a guy with a stick to "find" the corpse officially.
> The chances of randomly digging up a body by pure guess are vanishingly rare.
If your "guess" is a random walk, sure. But it isn't. You're going to walk around, see disturbed dirt, bias towards a trail, or where it makes sense, etc. I don't really but the trance thing.
This is what I was going to suggest. The rods are merely a catalyst to free your "intuitive senses" or whatever; noticing subtle depressions in the dirt, the arrangement of foliage being "off", etc. might be more apparent if you weren't looking directly at them (as counter-intuitive as that sounds, no pun intended... But tell me this- How many times have you come up with a solution to a problem long after you were directly thinking about it and while doing something entirely different? Because that has happened to me MANY times, I'm sure it's happened to many people who will read this, and is JUST as difficult to "prove scientifically")
Trained dogs are pretty good at locating buried corpses by smell. We know scientifically how it works, but no one has been able to build an artificial equivalent.
I'm going to play devils advocate here. We already know that the observer effect is real. We have no idea on what level the spiritual world is in. I would find it logical, that if we ever do discover that this paranormal realm we can tap into is real, that one of the reasons we ignored it so long is that, our intentions have much to do with it. So participating in studies to prove its real would effect how it behaves.
> We already know that the observer effect is real.
If you're talking about the quantum mechanics effect, then you're misunderstanding it. In QM 'observing' just means measuring something about a system. The only way we know of measuring stuff on a quantum level is by poking it with light or other particles. On the scale of quantum interactions, poking something with light affects the thing you're trying to measure. The 'observer effect' has nothing to do with there being any sort of conscious or intelligent observer.
Note for the confused: the "observer effect", as in modifying a system by poking it in order to measure it, is not the same thing as the uncertainty principal. Evidently, somehow, Heisenberg himself got the two confused (?!) which is why when I learned about it by fucking reading Heisenberg ("surely this will be accurate") I ended up thinking the two were basically the same thing.
Better than me defining it, you should choose a definition. Make it rigorous and unambiguously testable and your conundrum goes away.
Furthermore, plenty of phenomena are detectable without a present conscious observer. If I accidentally drop a bread crumb as I bite into a crusty sandwich while walking in the forest and nobody notices, does it ever land on the ground? (Note that in this case, there's no linguistic ambiguity to insert a false profundity to the question. "Land on the ground" is pretty clearly defined.)
We know the answer is yes because we understand gravity. And as evidence (rather than first principles), we might also find ants later in the spot where the breadcrumb landed.
We could eliminate that though. Even if there were an effect that was impacted by our intentions we could design experiments that were measuring the effect of earnestly carried out actions.
If the effect is broken as long as someone is able to, after the fact, discern if there's any benefit vs chance - there is no possible effect.
That's what Aleister Crowley was trying to do. His initial goal was to connect science and magick into a complete system. (He kinda devolved into crazy)
Why do some people feel it? Why do some dont? What is the nature of this "energy"? Can devices do magick instead of humans?
There's enough coincidences that should make most at least curious what's going on. It may be nothing... but probably isn't.
If you learn about biology and physiology of the human body and mind, you will realize that our senses are easily fooled by both external and internal forces. All of the so-called mystical forces are more easily explained by such factors.
Occam’s razor applies here. Human perception is incredible fallible and highly susceptible to self-subversion, and that is the simplest and most likely explanation of any magical or mystical phenomena.
> There is even a foundation with 1 million dollar price for whoever proves to have paranormal abilities
You probably mean the James Randi foundation prize. That was terminated in 2015.
Also, anything not understood scientifically as of now is "paranormal"... and these people claiming to give these prizes are not truly curious and have these to prove a point, the point being "we already know what is there to be known". They always have gotchas and are not worth the trouble. If you discover things like that, you are better off looking somewhere else.
Dark matter/energy is not fully understood scientifically, but is not "paranormal".
"Paranormal" are generally things that defy already-understood scientific laws. E.g. mind reading, telepathy, or "breatharianism". Often these phenomena fall apart completely once closely examined. A more edge case is/was the "Em Drive" thruster[1]. This seemed to hold up to scrutiny in a few tests, but further investigation showed the results may have been caused by subtle measurement error.
I think it's really uncharitable to claim that James Randi is "not truly curious". Indeed, I find proponents of the paranormal to be the incurious ones as they tend to stick to their beliefs even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. That's not curiosity, it's stubbornness.
Not everything is able to be reproduced scientifically and reversed engineered. It’s not less real because of that.
You may know how to ride a bike. Can you reverse engineer and explain in an algorithmic way how to ride a bike? No. Does that invalidate the fact that you can indeed ride a bike? Of course not.
Edit: do not fixate on the bike. It was just an example. Write a symphony, create a joke, understand irony.
Of course you can do that. You can even measure the angles and forces involved. There is no “unexplained physics” in bicycle riding.
Dowsing for corpses, on the other hand, absolutely requires new physics, because the pseudo-physical explanations offered around piezoelectricity and people having different voltages are deeply inconsistent with our understanding of physics.
I agree that there are things that are true but not explainable like at the edge of our knowledge, black holes, quantum physics etc.
But riding a bike seems very easy algorithm. All these self balancing scooters, remote controlled toys, seems like perfect examples of what you get when you reverse engineer bikes.
Of course we can reverse engineer and describe how bikes work...
Anyway, the fact that we can not formally prove all true things doesn't really matter. That doesn't make all things equally valid. We find supporting evidence, we build conceptual models, we test the periphery of systems.
Even if you could not explain how you ride a bike, you could still reproduce it scientifically. You don't have to understand something to reproduce it, only what parameters are needed for reproducing it.
You could observe the sun rising and setting long before understanding the revolutions of our planet.
If someone can do something, you can reproduce it. That's true for bike-riding, but apparently not true for dowsing.
The guy who dug the water well on my parents land used a dowsing rod. Interestingly, he chose to use the dowsing rod in the lowest point of the meadow... which probably saved him a few feet of drilling.
i have heard a personal experience of a family member who says he saw the event himself so i kinda have to understand it can be something:
"people were digging for water on a road because there was a pipe leak somewhere and it needed to be plugged. so here were bunch of men having dug an entire road section but nothing. this guy comes up. says to wait. he then holds rods (assuming dowsing rods) and says "here. dig here" and there was water there.
it can be a fluke but these men were tired and suddenly there was excitement.
no i dont know and i am not making any assumptions based on my single anecdotal evidence. i am saying, i know someone who can attest to seeing this pheonomeon. thats all. nothing more than that
Yeah same in Chile, the guys call it "el palito", we must be getting the same flukes you are. Frankly I have no objections against dumb luck, if it is actually going to work, whatever.
Like the weakness of science is prostitution. Not for math or humanities, but for science it's huge. Purdue Pharma is famous for its prostitutions, their biggest exploit was the majority of the guilt and blame for the opioid epidemic. That was carried out by several prostitutions carried out carefully and with great expertise, beginning with getting the FDA to agree that their opioid lasted twice as much as it actually did. The trick there is never to say twice or more, you can't overdo it, you actually have to promise almost twice as much as you deliver, 12 instead of 7, not 12 instead of 5. Scientists can't just make numbers up, well they can and do, but there's limits: no getting caught, can't double anything, can't look stupid on television. The second prostitution was sending their hot pharma rep sales team out to "refocus" the doctors on the 12 hour schedule for their drug, despite literally all of their patients saying it never lasted anywhere near that long. In this case I'm saying they got the doctors to believe "science" that were more made-up numbers pulled out of thin air. There were other prostitutions, like with the lawyers that defended them in court, and the nonprofits who sucked up to them publicly for their gifts of ill-gotten gains.
And those pharma sales reps...surely they never actually sleep with the doctors? They just get super hot women for that job just to improve doctor's reading comprehension, like a hot teacher in a middle school, that'll learn those boys real good, surely. [Note: I know you're meant to say it differently, I'm being colloquial]
Are you okay? Can't tell if this is AI or someone with lots of pictures on the wall all tied together with string and newspaper clippings and the word "prostituting" captioned on them.
He's from Chile and I think he is directly translating his local idioms into English. Basically what he is saying is "science" immediately goes out the window when big money is involved, that most people will sell out their morals for money.
Thanks for the reply, even with context his comment is just odd. I've been a Spanish speaker all my life and that does not resemble translated text, that resembles coffee, cigarettes and the "real story" of what happened to JFK and Jimmy Hoffa.
Coffee and cigarettes? Clearly you're dissing me, but I have no complaints, I'm turning the other cheek on that. I just want to know what you mean by coffee and cigarettes. Explain the idiom.
It looks like you typed in Spanish and did google translate on this (given you are talking about Chile). The translation output does not make a lot of sense. I think you meant "immoral marketing techniques" while the translation says prostitution. Looks like it is a Chilean idiom that does not translate well.
Haha, it's not a Chilean idiom. No google translate. The dowsing rod thing I was talking about Chile, but the rest was about mostly America.
Get real, medicine is a matter of life and death. Multilevel marketing is harmless if you're selling handicrafts, yeah then it's an immoral marketing technique. In medicine immoral marketing technique are prostitutions. Plural. Not an abstract noun, several counts of the transgression.
Like in Dr. Seuss, "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish":
One prostitution, two prostitutions...
And if google translate turns "técnicas inmorales de márketing" into "prostitution", general Artificial Intelligence is here. And don't think your English is that amazing, vaidhy.
I wonder if it's a bad machine translation of 'in bed with' or a similar idiom for corruption, as in 'the government is in bed with the oil industry when it comes to environmental policy'?
They can't overtly communicate to large groups of officers that they should just make something up (e.g. dog walker) but directing the crowd to place trust in something which is verifiable nonsense gives them the cover of conventional wisdom.
> In particular, some experts are distressed that a Vass trainee recently got witching results admitted as evidence in a Georgia murder trial.
As with most of these bits of pseudoscience, it's a probable cause generator.
> Vass tells him it’s about a quarter mile. “The advantage of this is you don’t have to be on a property to scan it,” he says. “You can be on a public street and scan your suspect’s yard.”
Oh, and while it can magically find missing people "as far as 75 miles" away, you can't get one.
> One student asks, “Do you mean if you have a missing child, you can take that child’s DNA and put it in that and go to work?”
> “Yeah, absolutely,” Vass says. “It doesn’t take long to find them.”
> “How much does one of those things cost?” another student asks. “I’ll write a check right now.”
> “I’m not selling them right now,” Vass says. “I’m just kind of assisting law enforcement when needed.” He says the device isn’t for sale because he’s concerned about national security issues. “I can tell you what room the president’s in in the White House,” he says. “ I can tell you which house has gold in it.”
And, if it doesn't work when Vass is doing it, it's because a mouse died there. (Which probably describes... everywhere.)
> With the excavation complete, Vass wants to discuss one last thing: the divining rods. “From the holes, it appeared to me that maybe an animal had burrowed down in there,” he tells Ponce. “If an animal like a little mouse died there, you’ll get a false positive. So just pay attention to that in the future.”
Courts are shockingly slow to adopt the conclusions of science, especially when such conclusions would have wide-ranging exclusionary effects on rules of evidence.
For more background, search for scandals related to FBI "bite mark" experts or disgraced former Texas detective Tom Coleman.
Courts work on procedure and appeal to authority, not science. Hopefully there is an overlap, but it's not required. Diligent application of appeal to authority by the more well funded party results in better outcomes.
Science basically has to enter courts through consensus, which means only the most sensational and visible conclusions of science will reach the legal system. Seems like a bit of a bottleneck for a developing civilization.
And shockingly slow to accept that the pseudoscience they’ve been allowing is bunk. See, e.g., shaken baby syndrome, and fire burn patterns supposedly indicative of arson. Heck, we’ve even know for years that breathalyzers are crazy unreliable and yet we constantly convict people based on the reading.
They will get an "expert" with 40 hours of training to vouch for it. There are quite a few pseudo sciences in use that either have little to no proof or have been outright shown to be wrong most of the time. I think the supreme court even found that lie detector tests are barely above flipping a coin and still left their use up to other courts. Facts don't matter, legal concepts do.
I don't think they should even be permitted for that, it's essentially preying on society at large's poor knowledge of science to falsely present polygraphs as something they're not. They're in the same category of woo as dowsing rods and earthed bedsheets, I think it's unreasonable for them to be used in any official context.
I would assume because the technic is absurd but it was not important during the trial. The important fact was they did find a human corpse where they were looking.
You probably need to say how you found the corpse, if was probably labelled 'vaguely' like 'using the technic "n#13" teached by the National Forensic Academy'and I assume no one really looked at it. (or they did but didn't care because they did'n wanted the culprit to get away with having a corpse in his backgarden or wathever happened.
There really needs to be an intersection between law and science/reason, just a few solid touchpoints. There need to be statutes that define a logical basis for what we do and do not, as a society with a legal system, believe to be true.
It really feels like the American society (now including the courts apparently) is losing its relationship with objective reality and any semblance of a shared set of ground truth facts. Things have been trending that way for a long while, but it really feels like the Orwellian knob has been jacked up an order of magnitude in the last 24 months.
If we can't agree on some basic rules about what is or is not true about fundamental reality, why even bother having courts or trials to determine higher level truths? A trial about the outcomes of magical/nonsensical processes is meaningless.
This stuff obviously shouldn't make it into the courtroom. The fact that it has means the system is broken, even if these particular people stop peddling this particular bullshit.
> It really feels like the American society (now including the courts apparently) is losing its relationship with objective reality and any semblance of a shared set of ground truth facts.
Actually in this particular case things are getting better because less and less shit is getting through into the court without reporting and scrutiny, due to the efforts of media and groups like the Innocence Project. Bite mark analysis, hair comparison, blood splatter analysis, lie detector testing, even breathalyzers are getting their due scrutiny and criticism where they haven’t been in the past.
Not a recent thing, if anything things are getting better over time, just slowly. I remember reading stuff about how "forensic science" has been the realm of quackery for as long as I have known how to read.
Police are incentivised to find whatever thingamajig will support their conclusions. Courts are not equipped to provide meta-review of every forensic claim. And for the bright, rational, scientific minds out there, working in forensics is relatively low-prestige and low-pay.
The fact that this was ever used in a courtroom is disturbing, but before we start collectively clutching our pearls, remember that authors are selling clicks, and it us the nature of articles like these to overstate the problem.
I am less concerned by the obvious nonsense like this, than I am about the far more dangerous nonsense that comes from legit, credentialed, FBI-endorsed “scientists” which a rational, informed, well intentioned judge or juror might give serious weight, (like bite marks, blood splatter, profiling, etc.)
>Things have been trending that way for a long while, but it really feels like the Orwellian knob has been jacked up an order of magnitude in the last 24 months.
Governments having much of a relationship with objective reality at all is a fairly new phenomenon and very much a product of the Enlightenment. It wasn't too long ago that court astrologers and politicised clergy were intimately involved in decisions that effected the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. What we're seeing is the erosion of Enlightenment rationalism into what we had before, the state saying 2 + 2 = 5 when it's convenient and browbeating anyone who points out how ridiculous they're being.
>If we can't agree on some basic rules about what is or is not true about fundamental reality, why even bother having courts or trials to determine higher level truths?
I'm sure this exact question went through the mind of Galileo Galilei when he was forced to recant his heliocentric views. Objective reality doesn't care about society's power structures, so society's power structures return the favour.
The subtitle of this article should read, "when science is performed irresponsibly, pseudoscience is treated like science."
Academia has a reproducibility crisis. Forensics has endured its own struggle with credibility. The media is undergoing similar scrutiny. When that which is expected to be trustworthy is proved unreliable, then how does society distinguish between that which is unreliable in design (e.g. dowsing) and that which is unreliable in execution (e.g. academic publications)?
Isn't that largely isolated to psychology and related "soft" sciences? I have not heard of a physics or chemistry reproducibility crisis. Not to mention that dowsing violates basic physics/chemistry that predate any "reproducibility crisis".
You may be right though that people trust science less. This is really funny considering how much science (that has to work) underpins something like an iPhone.
Yes, the reproducibility crisis affects just about all disciplines. When researchers are pressured to aim for impact and citations in their publications that doesn't leave room to reproduce other people's results. So as you say in the soft sciences we have that results are failing to reproduce, but in the hard sciences we have results that we don't know if they would reproduce or not, because no one has attempted it.
As an Australian…. What in the hell is this? Dowsing rod evidence being admissible in court? I can’t even believe it’s a suggestion let alone someone with authority in a school who would teach this. Where is liability here? Where are the watchdogs or regulators?
Wait until the next free trade agreement has America pushing on the other participant as well. Same as they've been doing for their other bunk (copyright & patent rules, etc). ;)
> Vass tells him it’s about a quarter mile. “The advantage of this is you don’t have to be on a property to scan it,” he says. “You can be on a public street and scan your suspect’s yard.”
So this guy is claiming he can track someone in a closed house from room to room from a pretty reasonable distance away. Ignoring the more obvious problem that this isn't true, if it were true would this require a warrant?
I guess it might depend partially on the mechanism of how it works? Which is of course convenient since there is no formally defined mechanism of how it works. But it's funny to me that the way that the police are getting around needing a warrant is to say, "oh, it's fine, we had probable cause because someone magically invaded your privacy on our behalf." It's a bit like saying, "we have probable cause to search your house because we heard you say something suspicious after we bugged it."
Apparently dowsing is still used in California's Central Valley to determine where to drill wells (the valley sits on top of an aquifer, though it is being drawn down unsustainably).
I asked a farmer about this and he said that yes, he uses a "witcher" and that they are good at finding water though they can't tell you how deep (!!). Of course I assumed he was pulling my leg but I later encountered someone on that property wielding a coat hanger to tell this same farmer where to drill.
At a house we owned where the well had run dry, we hired the guy who ran the local water treatment plant to come and dig us a new well. Sure enough, came out, dowsed, and duly a backhoe dug down about 10 foot, and we had our new well.
This is in N.E. Scotland, back in about 1991. The funny thing was that my dad was a total skeptic on this, and such other 'discredited' things as spoon-bending, and even he had to admit the guy had some not easily explainable talent.
> (I'd bet there are surface features that give hints to the underlying hydrology, too.)
Hard to imagine but I’m no geologist.
But the vally sits atop an aquifer so if you’re willing to drill arbitrarily deep you’re pretty much certain to hit water. Thus I find the refusal to specify depth hilarious.
Certain types of strata absorb water, and certain kinds don't. Locations of water sources, slopes, etc. will all matter. Some of these things will hint on the surface at what lies below.
I think the deepest people drill is not much more than 300 ft (still takes a lot of energy to raise a head of water) so maybe you’re right. It doesn’t seem that deep in geological terms so seeing traces on the surface is plausible to me(but again, I’m no geologist).
I saw a movie where they used a device to make a forceful impact in the ground, and there were probes staked in the ground that imaged underground based on the acoustics. It was an alien movie, so I’m not hopeful, but is there not technology like that being worked on? Sonar for underground?
Well, if that ain't a great way to manufacture a warrant.
What exactly is wrong with cadaver dogs, anyway? I'm guessing it's that cadaver dogs actually work on scientific principles. (Edit: dogs also can't smell a body from across the street. At least, I don't think they can.)