Friday, March 19, 2010
The United States and Mexico are separated by a 3000 km border that
stretches across the most forbidding desert in North America. Mexican drug
traffickers, for whom the US drug market is El Dorado, are fighting a
bloody war with the democratically elected government of Mexico over
control of the border. According to Mondays New York Times, outgunned
Mexican officials spent more than $10 million to purchase high-tech dowsing
rods to detect caches of drugs, or weapons or anything else you have in
mind. The first application was as a golf-ball finder sold in Golf-Pro shops, http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN96/wn012696.html .
The Mexican army says the devices are extremely helpful. Made in the UK by Global Technologies Ltd.,
the GT 200 has no sensors. Priced at more than $20,000, its a plastic rod
attached to a hand grip by a swivel, allowing the rod to point in any
direction depending on the orientation of the handle. That also describes
the ADE 650 sold by ATSC Ltd., another UK company which recently sold 1,500
imaginary detectors to the Iraqis to search for explosives at checkpoints
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN09/wn110609.html .
Could Global Technologies and ATSC be the same company, switching names and locations to avoid exposure?
The British government took action, notifying Mexico and other countries
that the GT 200 "may not work." Of course it "works"; it just doesn't
detect anything. That's not its purpose. Human Rights Watch is worried
that people are actually being arrested and charged solely on the basis of
readings from the device. That could happen; in the United States,
however, local law enforcement agencies use these devices to justify
probable-cause for searches. Whether it's done with a willow branch or a
GT 200, dowsing falls in a special category of voodoo science, along with
homeopathy and prayer, that we might call "pretend science." We treat
pretend science much too lightly. It ignores the most basic principle of
science: cause and effect. Causality should be stressed in the education
of every child. The British government is said to be considering
legislation to stop exports of the GT 200 and similar devices, but a
British diplomat in Mexico said of the GT 200, "It's now up to the Mexican
authorities." Why is it that the people who market imaginary science never
seem to go to jail? I served several State Attorneys General as a expert
witness in cases involving charges of fraudulent science. Every case ended
with a consent decree in which the perpetrator agreed to stop cheating
residents of that state.
Whether the effect has anything to do with cancer is another matter. The
ubiquitous presence of cell phones only started about a decade ago. If
there is a more lengthy incubation period associated with cell-phone
radiation we could be headed for a virtual epidemic. Just in case, the
media has now taken to reporting the relative intensity levels of various
models. That sort of listing does not put people's minds at rest, but so
far there is nothing to implicate the cell phone in brain cancer. To the
observation that microwave photons are not energetic enough to break a
chemical bond in DNA, several readers observed that microwaves can
heat tissue, which is certainly true. However, the very large
blood flow in the brain serves as an effective coolant.
Subra Suresh, 53, dean of engineering at MIT, is the White House choice to
succeed Arden Bement as head of the National Science Foundation.
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