For it to be an antiscience thing, the people who bought the rods would have to actually believe they work. The poor soldiers might, but not the higher-ups.

For one thing, that figure includes large numbers of people killed (deliberately and inadvertantly) by the Thai military and police. I’m under the impression that most of the people killed by the Muslim separatists have been shot, beheaded and/or burned.

Most bomb attacks in Thailand seem to kill no more than a few people (which is still terrible, yes), and separatists don’t seem to have been able to make the sorts of big bombs that routinely kill 200 or 300 people at a time in Pakistan. I love Thailand and hope to hell they don’t get them.

I could be wrong, though. Do you have any links that contradict this?

Perhaps I’m being nitpicky or pedantic, but I don’t think it’s all that accurate to say “thousands of people *are dying* of bomb attacks in Thailand. Thousands of people have died from bombs in Iraq but we don’t say that thousands of people *are dying* of bombs in Iraq.

The main point remains, though, that the scum who are selling divining rods as bomb detectors should go directly to jail.

Maybe humans can be taught to sniff out explosives. That should satisfy everyone.

GAry 7

http://www.herorat.org/en/landminesstink

Monkeys maybe? I’m pretty sure its monkeys, rats, dogs, and pigs that go on the list of offensive animals, kind of ironic that those would also be the most likely species for detecting explosives.

“of the majority of a populace and still fight against those who say, think that blowing up students is a good way to express their distaste to idea of educating women.”

Ah, democracy, an example of quantum mechanics in action.

26. Robert Madewell

Goats, you say? ,,,and how long have YOU been in the desert, maty?

I expect a really good sniffer is part of the predator sensory expertise. As bad as goats smell, I doubt a good nose would be a survival advantage.

GAry 7

Gary 7

BS. You offer no citation, and your claim is meaningless. Is that 40% correct positives (which would be much better than 0 correct positives), 40% correct negatives (which would imply either dogs that bark at nearly everyone or a heck of a lot of people with bombs), or 40% of each — which is worse than a coin flip?

http://twitter.com/ebertchicago/status/9542072926

I mean, when they’re waving them trying to detect bombs, are they shouting “Petronus!” in the proper fashion?

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/w_k_clifford/ethics_of_belief.html

Miko, you do understand that this is in Thailand and we are talking about the Thai army? They are already home.
Where do you get the idea that detaining someone at a checkpoint automatically creates another terrorist? What data support this? Would you start killing police officers over an unwarranted traffic stop? People are not so simple-minded as that and they are not unaware of the threat. Those who support terrorist objectives, the terrorists’ many propagandists and supporters, will say otherwise of course, but their objective is to undermine anti-terrorist measures. It seems to work on a certain number of Americans and others, if your post is any indication.
Fighting terrorists only creates more terrorists among those who are sympathetically committed to the terrorists in the first place. Millions of people have been negatively affected by the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many of them; again, quite likely in the millions; have suffered a great deal more than being detained at a checkpoint. Yet there are not millions of terrorists.

This “success” would then be attributed to the effectiveness of the device instead of to the shrewd instinct of the agent who made the find. This both falsely elevates the prestige of the phony device and detracts from the effectiveness of the agent who is denied both the confirmation of his own instincts and the praise he should have received for his good judgment.