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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Everybody always thinks this about stuff that doesn't work. It turns out it's total bullshit.

There was someone I knew who claimed that dowsing rods worked a similar way. A good practitioner of the dowsing rod was really using the information from his audience and was Hans the Mathematical Horsing his way to water. The audience of course had this information from the subtle way they picked up on cues of water, ways even they didn't recognize until the dowsing rod was in action.

They all think this. Some can even bend spoons.

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A friend bought land to build a house on where dowsing was culturally pervasive. He knew it was bogus but it was cheap compared to the land price and everybody around was heavily pushing it. An old guy came out and, during the performance, told him the total history of the land parcel, including stuff that would be inappropriate in formal disclosures ("those neighbors are assholes" etc). They did hit water, but the whole area is pretty verdant.

Dowsing rods are an excuse to trust common sense; that dip in the land where plants are greener is probably a good place for a well. But digging wells is expensive so people want something more than a guess, but also something cheap.

When I was a kid, a new house was being built downhill from my parents and they dowsed out a "good" place for a well. They were all set to drill before my dad went out and told them they were directly downhill from our septic tank.

What's "downhill from a septic tank"? Isn't a septic tank a container that slowly fills up and is periodically emptied by a truck or something? There is no "flow downhill", is there? I thought the whole reason to have a septic tank is that you have no place for the stuff to go.

Septic systems are more interesting than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septic_drain_field

A straight tank would fill up in no time.

Unless you're in a location where you absolutely can't leach the liquid waste out into a leach field (like right on a lake), the tank usually just settles the solids and give the liquid some time to mingle with whatever biological processes are happening in the tank.

When the ground doesn't perk naturally, it's common up here to build a mound system where you have a mound of soil that does perk and vegetation (grass) on it to take up the liquid.

A fully closed tank is basically the last resort. We have friends with a house right on a lake, and their tank had to be pumped every three weeks before they had a kid. I can't imagine what the interval is now.

Thanks for explaining, I had no idea.

The best brain power a human possess is subconscious-- its all the perception that allows you to run fast around moving people and catch a ball. You can do it but you can't explain how. You can probably train yourself to be good at finding water or reading people but you might be bad at explaining why. Worse-- trying to explain yourself might be forcing you to use the feeble symbol processing power of your brain. So a prop helps you feel your way.

Still-- total bs.

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