Crime scene investigators learn to dowse for the dead

Dog noses ARE insane, but they're probably not THAT insane.

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

http://www.tricksterbook.com/ArticlesOnline/Dowsing.htm

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 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.

"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.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

(lightly edited)

It was a fluke

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.”

For more background, search for scandals related to FBI "bite mark" experts or disgraced former Texas detective Tom Coleman.

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.

Total speculation of course.

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.)

I think the general trend is one of big improvement, but things are definitely worse now in this regard than they were 2 or 10 years ago.

"... on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training."

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.