Mar 11, 2012 -- 1:00PM, christine3 wrote:

You are mistaken.

Then all of science is mistaken. If you wish to claim that science is wrong, then go ahead, but I'm not about to be so arrogant.

Besides, you have stated that you live in another state, not CA.

You are confused. I have never claimed to be living in any other state than California. I was born and raised here. Again, you are seriously and considerably confused.

Mar 11, 2012 -- 1:22PM, mountain_man wrote:

Mar 11, 2012 -- 1:08PM, IreneAdler wrote:

Uh-oh. When did Yosemite relocate?

Yosemite has been right were it is for the last 100 million years or so. I did help them move Half Dome to the other side of the Valley. It looks much better there.

Whew!

Nice touch on the Half Dome project.

Irene.

Mar 11, 2012 -- 1:28PM, christine3 wrote:

Mar 11, 2012 -- 12:12PM, mountain_man wrote:

Of course your pendulum was wrong.

There are reasons for pendulum answers to be wrong.  That ALL dowsers can be proven incompetent, is NOT one of the reasons.  If that were the case, there would be no successes at all using pendulums or any other dowsing tool.

It’s not a matter of success or failure but the rate of success.  One should be able to show rate of dowsing success is better than chance.  Even chance gets things right at times.

Irene.

Thanks for explaining, Christine3!

My take on such practises is that they are fancy ways of drawing random numbers, speaking as the statistician that I am. This is most obvious when looking at Tarot, but also in reading tea leaves, or the I Ching.

The pendulum and dousing rod belong to the same category. They generate a mixture of internal tendencies of the "user / performer" and randomness inherent in the procedure itself. The task is how to interpret such a mixture.

The outcome of such procedures, like the outcome of a Rorschach test (same type of procedure in my view), can tell quite a lot about the internal states of the user / performer / test person. As such, there is truth to it, certainly.

As the statistician that I am, I am quite intrigued by the way randomness is being utilised outside the mathematical disciplines. Another instance are the cut-up and fold-in techniques of re-arranging text material for literary purposes, as practised by the Dadaists and William S. Burroughs.

This is great stuff.

In my view, only the use of randomness opens us up to completely new experiences. It is a tool from heaven, so to speak ;-)