9ES156: Dripping With Spielberg’s Latest Release
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In my notes for content for this show probably half the page or more was filled with stats about the latest escalation of human rights abuses in Gaza, and the latest escalation to the territorial pissings of the ruling elite in Syria. Pissing in Syria of course, not that the ruling elite are actually in Syria. Fuck no. We leapt from subject to subject, each a new height in an already turgid tower of petty and self-indulgent musings, and I became less and less interested in visiting those subjects.
Nobody wants to hear about that shit, Jon. Yeah, obviously, this is a podcast about geek nonsense. I like geek nonsense. Talking about it I get happy and excited. Are we on the eve of the first open warfare between 1st world nuclear powers in a generation? Will the consequences involve military intervention including Canadian combatants? Isn’t all this worth talking about?
Of course we have geopolitical musings somewhat less erudite than our opinions on, say, the differences between the 3rd and the 3rd and a half editions of Dungeons and Dragons.
Will we look back on these days of idyll fondly? Perhaps we will despise ourselves for doing nothing; worse: for fiddling while the world burned.
The bed music during our advertising is an old loop by Dan of Steel!
The bed music while we explain what the episode is about is Son of a Bit “Chased by a Running Chupacabra” used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Finally, the song we use in the intro is “Shiny Spaceship” by the 8-bit Ninjas. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
So check this out:
In a 1987–88 study in Munich by Hans-Dieter Betz and other scientists, 500 dowsers were initially tested for their skill, and the experimenters selected the best 43 among them for further tests. Water was pumped through a pipe on the ground floor of a two-storey barn. Before each test, the pipe was moved in a direction perpendicular to the water flow. On the upper floor, each dowser was asked to determine the position of the pipe. Over two years, the dowsers performed 843 such tests and, of the 43 pre-selected and extensively tested candidates, at least 37 showed no dowsing ability. The results from the remaining 6 were said to be better than chance, resulting in the experimenters’ conclusion that some dowsers “in particular tasks, showed an extraordinarily high rate of success, which can scarcely if at all be explained as due to chance … a real core of dowser-phenomena can be regarded as empirically proven.”
6 of those guys were actually wizards.