I’d say he debunks dowsing here, but he doesn’t quite do that. If you read between the lines then you’ll get that conclusion, but it’s amazing what he does through suggestion (which is really all dowsing is anyway):
By the way, Derren Brown’s book, Tricks of the Mind, is excellent. (And so is his TV series Trick of the Mind.) I found his memory tips very helpful — and the last 1/3 of the book is on skepticism and atheism. Plus you’ll learn a couple card tricks. It’s a bit hard to find in the US, but you can sometimes find it from sellers on Amazon.
What an utterly amazing illusionist Derren Brown really is. HOW THE HELL DO YOU DO THAT MAN!!!!!!?????
So we’re given no real idea of how long it took the guy to find the film cannister after he answered those questions. My guess would be that there was plenty of time between those two–enough time for a crew member to write the appropriate paragraph, bury the cannister far from where the guy currently was, and erase the tracks. Then they played sounds of running water very subtly through his earpiece, getting louder as he got closer. Very impressive!
In answer to your question “You want WordPress to pay you for costing them money?” My answer is no. However, WP gets people to come here, and possibly click the links on their ads, because we bloggers produce the content that people come to see.
Several readers have emailed me, and even complained to me in RL that it seems hypocrisy for me to post anti-corpoRATe articles, while there is a walmart ad right next to it. I have to agree that’s ugly.
I have no problem with WP or any other site putting ads on their own pages. They can stick as many ads on WP pages as they like. I do however wish they would not put them on any blogs at all. Only the blog owner should have the power to put ads or anything else, on our own blogs.
No WP employee would go to someone else’s blog and add words or pictures on a post. When ads are added, that is exactly what they are doing. They are modifying someone else’s blog, without permission!
Really, I love WP. I hope to blog here for many years to come. This issue has been simmering for a while. I know of several former WP bloggers who left this site because of this issue. It’s good that we finally got this out in the open.
The scientifically impossible I do right away
The spiritually miraculous takes a bit longer
Tricks of the mind become one of my Favourite books very soon after I brought it home from the book store. That Gentleman is awesome…
hmm…
Dowsing is where my skepticism breaks down just a little because the house where I grew up got its drinking water from a well dowsed by my grandfather.
@wazza: So anywhere else they would have drilled wouldn’t have hit water? ;)
quite possibly, we lived in a sandy area, basically water everywhere… but apparently we hit an underground stream.
Still, the whole story is quite odd. My family has a history of odd occurrences that fly totally against the rationalism I spend most of my time defending…
@wazza: Well the only thing a rational person should think was strange is if there wasn’t strange occurrences. Imagine would conclusion you would come to water dowsing never found any water?