The Mr. Don Thread

[J_Player]

This is a new thread started for the Geotech forum member Don Jose de La Mancha.
He expressed an interest in discussing whether an LRL can ever work, but did not start a thread to discuss it.

Is this why I am starting this thread?
Yes, partly.
But I am also starting it in order to put an end to a lot of non sequitur posts that don't seem to stop in another thread dedicated to discussing an "honest and innocent outsider's" comments about Geotech.
My final reason for starting this thread is because Don Jose de La Mancha asked me to: http://www.geotech1.com/forums/showt...461#post120461

Originally Posted by Don Jose de La Mancha

HI J_P my friend: You posted -->Or do you plan to continue making irrelevant posts
***************
Relevancy, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Be my guest in opening a new forum, but make it broad.

Don Jose de La Mancha

p.s. I haven't been called 'Mr' since I ceased being an officer in the USAF. Swr substitutes @##$%%^^%%&^^^ for that , and he is probably right. SOOO hint--!

I will start by saying the purpose of this thread is to discuss whether an LRL can ever work.
But in order to keep this thread broad, I gave it the title "The Mr. Don Thread" instead of "Can an LRL ever work", not knowing where the discussions will lead.

For this particular thread, feel free to wander off-topic or post irrelevant information if it captures beauty in your eye.
You may call Don Jose de La Mancha "Mr. Don", as I do, "Don Jose de La Mancha", or "@##$%%^^%%&^^^", as SWR does.
You can talk about memorable times from any past military service you have done, or how testing, Explorer Club, or medical studies, or how sleeping in your car relates to the possibilities of an LRL ever working.

Hopefully Mr. Don will make the first relevant post so we can see what direction this thread will take.

Best wishes to all
J_P

[Jim]

Cool. A thread for @##$%%^^%%&^^^

[J_Player]

Originally Posted by Jim

Cool. A thread for @##$%%^^%%&^^^

Excellent post. A bit off topic, but that's ok for this thread.

Best wishes,
J_P

[Theseus]

In an effort to get back on topic....

Yes. An LRL might sometime in the future "work" IF:

• it did not depend on an ideomotor response
• the operator does not have to hold it in order for it to work
• it does not involve pseudoscience
• Hung, Dell, Claude, Mike, Tim or Bob are not involved in the sale of it

[J_Player]

Originally Posted by Theseus

In an effort to get back on topic....

Yes. An LRL might sometime in the future "work" IF:

• it did not depend on an ideomotor response
• the operator does not have to hold it in order for it to work
• it does not involve pseudoscience
• Hung, Dell, Claude, Mike, Tim or Bob are not involved in the sale of it

Interesting.
One LRL has been called a "treasure tri-corder".
I wonder if Captain Kirk's tri-corder would work when he set it down on a desk, or on a rock at a distant planet?
I suppose it depended on the script writer's mood and what embellishments he added.

I wonder if the current "treasure tri-corder" will work when you set it down on a desk, or on a rock on earth.
I wonder if it will work when you hold it in your hand ...

Best wishes,
J_P

P.S. Maybe off topic, but I'm trying to be broad here.

[WM6]

Originally Posted by J_Player

Hopefully Mr. Don will make the first relevant post so we can see what direction this thread will take.

J_P

Hopeless, Mr. Don is more techy than LRL boy- as you can se here:

http://www.geotech1.com/forums/showp...&postcount=149

[Rudy]

At the risk of adding a little structure, I offer the following partitions. When dealing with electronic LRLs, we typically find a dowsing rod of sorts "hidden" somewhere. So we have:

1. Dowsing.
2. Current electronic LRLs and underlying "scientific principles of operation" and theory.
3. Future electronic LRLs and new underlying "scientific principles of operation and theory.

For the sake of the discussion, let us agree that there are individuals possessed with an innate dowsing ability, for some unknown reason. Taking this premise as a given, then these individuals are able to find water and or precious metals using inexpensive dowsing rods.

The current crop of LRLs are all based on pseudo science and voodoo magic, surrounding a dowsing rod as a pointing device and sold for an outrageous price. Now, it may be that some honest people have actually found something of value. If so, it may be that these individuals posses a keen dowsing ability and would have found the item with plain dowsing rods, in which case the electronic LRL has no value add. As a corollary, people without an innate dowsing ability will not find anything with these electronic LRLs except by sheer accident .

In summary, today's electronic LRLs are expensive and will possibly produce results only for those few individuals that could have found the treasure with simple dowsing rods (you know who you are). The mere mortals among us that can't dowse for water in a filled bath tub, would be wasting our hard earned money buying an electronic LRL because they won't work for us.

What will a future crop of electronic LRLs bring? I leave that to the inventiveness of LRL manufacturers to come up with it. Just please, try to do it without incorporating a dowsing rod.

[WM6]

Originally Posted by Rudy

For the sake of the discussion, let us agree that there are individuals possessed with an innate dowsing ability, for some unknown reason. Taking this premise as a given, then these individuals are able to find water and or precious metals using inexpensive dowsing rods.

If an innate dowsing ability really work, there is no magic, but siple explanation (scientifically explained 100 years ago), as for water dowsing (there are undoubted sign on soil surface and vegetation over water or specific metal deposits):

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...889099,00.html

[J_Player]

Originally Posted by Rudy

At the risk of adding a little structure, I offer the following partitions. When dealing with electronic LRLs, we typically find a dowsing rod of sorts "hidden" somewhere. So we have:

1. Dowsing.
2. Current electronic LRLs and underlying "scientific principles of operation" and theory.
3. Future electronic LRLs and new underlying "scientific principles of operation and theory.

For the sake of the discussion, let us agree that there are individuals possessed with an innate dowsing ability, for some unknown reason. Taking this premise as a given, then these individuals are able to find water and or precious metals using inexpensive dowsing rods.

The current crop of LRLs are all based on pseudo science and voodoo magic, surrounding a dowsing rod as a pointing device and sold for an outrageous price. Now, it may be that some honest people have actually found something of value. If so, it may be that these individuals posses a keen dowsing ability and would have found the item with plain dowsing rods, in which case the electronic LRL has no value add. As a corollary, people without an innate dowsing ability will not find anything with these electronic LRLs except by sheer accident .

In summary, today's electronic LRLs are expensive and will possibly produce results only for those few individuals that could have found the treasure with simple dowsing rods (you know who you are). The mere mortals among us that can't dowse for water in a filled bath tub, would be wasting our hard earned money buying an electronic LRL because they won't work for us.

What will a future crop of electronic LRLs bring? I leave that to the inventiveness of LRL manufacturers to come up with it. Just please, try to do it without incorporating a dowsing rod.

Hmmmm....

If we accept for the sake of discussion that there are individuals possessed of an innate dowsing ability, then we remove the "broadness" of this thread which would allow Qiaozhi and Theseus to argue that dowsing is nothing more than a trick of the mind. However, we also conserve the "broadness" that allows many dowsers to introduce anecdotes of their dowsing prowess. Maybe it's a wash for maintaining broadness...
But seeing how relevancy is said to be in the eye of the beholder, I suppose anything goes.

So accepting for the sake of argument that some individuals are possessed of an innate dowsing ability, another condition becomes apparent: The LRL manufacturers may agree that some people have an innate dowsing ability. And they may know that most of these rare people with an innate ability to dowse are not aware of their ability to dowse. If this is the case, these manufacturers may be counting on a few people with innate dowsing abilities to try their LRL and to discover they are finding treasures or other things their LRLs are said to find. Maybe the LRL user is unaware that dowsing is the principle under which he is finding things. So he becomes convinced the LRL is actually finding these things.

Is this possible?
Here is one page that lists the H3Tec detector along with the Sniffex and other similar detectors that look similar to a dowsing rod: http://sniffexquestions.blogspot.com/
Be sure to watch the video of the GT200 being opened in Tailand to show the electronics inside that makes it worth £22,000 ($36,000). You now have a clear view of what the circuit inside is reading when you insert one of the cards in the handle to set the machine to read any particular substance. Since there are no electronics, it looks to me like the only method left for it to find a bomb is dowsing. The government of Thailand has since banned the use of the GT200 for locating bombs.

And what about the LRLs for sale that do have electronics inside?
Do they work any better?
Or do they depend on dowsing abilities too?
You can watch a video of BBC Newsnight that shows several LRL bomb detectors that they investigated, along with a manufacturer of these detectors explaining how they work: http://gizmodo.com/5455692/ade+651-m...illed-hundreds

Ummm... Yup, I suppose it is possible.
If the LRL manufacturers are counting on a few people with innate dowsing abilities to provide testimonials that their LRLs really work to find things, then the result has been for most people who do not have this innate dowsing ability to fail to find things and maybe end up dead because their LRL did not locate a bomb. In the case of finding treasure, we see a lot of wasted time, empty holes, lost money, and used LRLs for sale at a discount.

Now I have done what Mr. Don wanted. I have made the discussion even broader.
Those people who do not believe that some individuals are possessed of an innate dowsing ability now have a reason to post the concept that dowsing is nothing more than a trick of the mind. They can point out that LRL treasure detectors and bomb detectors can only work when you already know where the treasure or bomb is located, thus filling this thread with more discussions that are perhaps non sequiturs to the concept of whether an LRL could ever work. But what the heck, it still makes for fun reading.

Hmmm... if it works only when you already know where the treasure or bomb is located, then why would you need the locator?
Wouldn't it be better to use a locator that finds the treasure or bomb when you don't know where it is located?
Maybe this could be the function of future electronic LRLs that are based on real science and can pass a double blind test to locate things like any toy metal detector can.

Best wishes,
J_P

[Rudy]

My reasoning is that it would avoid rat holing the discussions around hear say about someone finding something with it and letting us concentrate on the technical merits of how it is claimed to work.

[J_Player]

Originally Posted by Rudy

My reasoning is that it would avoid rat holing the discussions around hear say about someone finding something with it and letting us concentrate on the technical merits of how it is claimed to work.

Hi Rudy.
You are correct.
Your reasoning to accept that dowsing actually works for some people would tend to discourage irrelevant anecdotes about finding things.
At the risk of defeating Mr. Don's request to make it broad, I could help concentrate on technical merits...

For a future electronic LRL the technical merits could be very interesting.
There are a number of emerging technologies that could be applied, and maybe work to locate things at long distance.
I suppose exploring the different embodiments and applications of new technology could be a nebulous undertaking, considering all the possibilities.

For existing electronic LRL technology, the technical merits are becoming stale.
We heard about the technical claims that cannot be proved by any independent tests, and cannot be shown to work if skeptical witnesses are watching them work.
In fact we heard how some of the technical claims were proven to be untrue.

These technical merits include finding hidden things such as treasures by detecting any of the following alleged things:

Detecting the location of a "signal line" which radiates from a hidden thing.
Detecting the location of ionic activity in the air from a distance.
Detecting the location of ionic activity in the ground from a distance.
Detecting the location of electrostatic activity in the air from a distance.
Detecting the location of charges in the soil from a distance.
Detecting the location of metal isotopes from a distance.
Detecting the location of molecular vibrations of a substance from a distance.
Detecting the location of acoustic vibrations of a substance from a distance.
Detecting the location of subatomic electronic distortions within a substance from a distance.
Detecting the location of infrared radiation from buried treasure on the surface of the ground from a distance.
Detecting anomalies of any of the above items from a distance.
Detecting the location of a Jinn, Leprechaun, or other spirit that is said to hide near where treasures are buried.

In many cases, the technical merits include a whip antenna which is moved by some force to point in the direction of the hidden object, or a circular coil that receives the strongest signal when its axis is pointing directly at the hidden object. As we know, these are the worst possible positions for a whip antenna or coil antenna to receive an RF signal, so it would seem the LRL signal is not RF in nature. The technical merits do not include the ability to pass a test where the LRL must find an object that someone hides for the LRL user to find. Since the theories of how LRLs work cannot be explained with regular known science, we still have pseudoscience to explain it, or ESP or dowsing or magic. Of course, there are some LRL enthusiasts who claim there are new scientific discoveries that are not known to mainstream science that explain how LRLs work. However, nobody has seen these new discoveries work to produce any useful results.

Maybe there is more to the discussion than what I have read before. Perhaps stories of homeless entrepreneurs sleeping in their car can help explain the technical merits of existing electronic LRLs?

Best wishes,
J_P

[Rudy]

Originally Posted by J_Player

Hi Rudy.
.
.
.
Detecting the location of a Jinn, Leprechaun, or other spirit that is said to hide near where treasures are buried.
.
.
.
J_P

That is a new one on me. Looks promising. Would it work anywhere or only in Arabia and Ireland?