One heck of a chicken is eyeing up its perch

[bellinghman]

It looks as though this story - Useless bomb detector sold worldwide risks lives - is finally getting mainstream attention.

To summarise - the Iraqi security forces have been gulled into paying up to $40,000 per item for a woo device that supposedly 'dowses' for explosives or whatever.

Of course it doesn't work.

When one fails to detect a bomb (as will be the case in Iraq), people get blown up. People get mutilated. People get killed.

What gets me is that not only is there a guy making serious amounts of money out of selling these useless objects, but that there are people around the world who have been convinced to buy them.

People - this is an attempt to use magic. And when it comes to the hard, physical world, magic doesn't work. On soft, psychological aspects, it may do - the human mind is a complex thing, and belief in something can have amazingly strong effects, to the extent of affecting one's physiology. But it won't work miracles - the strongest belief that one can fly without using wings won't going save one falling off a cliff.

This is almost as shameful as promoting homeopathy for curing AIDS.

Comments

[vatine]

The belief in magic is strong. It is also appealing. Especially when coated in technobabble (as the high-tech dowsing rods marketing tend to be). What gets me is that several iterations of them have demonstrably been no better than chance at detecting explosives under controlled circumstances over the last 10-odd years and they're STILL on the market.