The room was slightly packed for Dick's talk..

Debunking divining

Dick first up gave a very engaging talk about some of his experiences back around the 1980s with a competition he and James Randi held to test the claims of water diviners. The prize: 40 grand, the challenge: a ploughed up field with series of pipes that diviners demonstrate their craft. Contestants agreed on the conditions of the test as fair and that they wouldn’t have any complaints later. Results: no better than chance and the only thing flowing was a stream of excuses.

The interesting part of the night was that at the end it was revealed that in the audience were two family members of one of the original divining test participants. A son and a granddaughter I believe. Funny how times change.

But he stressed that the people weren’t lying when they said they believed they had powers (or bits of wire with powers), but it is just a case of self delusion – which we humans (“except for me of course”) are pretty damned good at.

You can’t trust your own eyes

One of the themes he explored was the notion that “you can’t trust your own eyes”. His personal example was the search for the Kookaburra (a plane sent out to track down another missing plane piloted by Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm) which he swore he saw as he flew over a patch of outback. With a closer look it had vanished. That was ok, because a few years later he found it quite a distance away thus proving that you can’t automatically trust your eyes (or else the ghosts moved the plane in the meantime I suppose).

This is one of the things I have brought up when discussing guns with pro-gun types. They’re convinced they’ll be perfectly able to tell the difference between the dark shapes creeping through their living room at night and not shoot someone they don’t mean to. My take is that our brains have evolved to automatically assume the worst (e.g. a predator/enemy) as a survival trait. It stands to reason that natural selection would favour those who run or fight an ambiguous potential threat rather than quietly waiting to see whether it eats you.

The legend of Dick Smith

Anyhow, it was good getting to hear Dick speak, he’s been one of those larger than life characters throughout my life. As we’d term in Australia “a bit of a legend”.

Like a slightly less flamboyant, Australian, beardless version of Richard Branson. My parents talked about him when I was a kid. He was talked about in cub scouts (as one of the successful scouting figures) in between learning reef knots and sleeping bag rolling. In school the story of Dick Smith Electronics growing from nothing was almost required reading in business studies (a great rags to riches story and some sound advice on properly marking the prices on all stock).

The guy has circled the world in a helicopter, staged stunts involving towing an iceberg into Sydney harbour, flown around doing nature documentaries (Australian Geographic) and owned the electronics store that had the biggest Australian flag on it my young eyes had ever seen.

Seems to have a good amount of patriotism (the proper kind, not what Americans have done to the meaning of the word “patriot”) in his attempts to boost up the “made in Australia” stuff.

‘Til next time

The skeptic bunch seemed friendly enough, although without the discussion section to the night it wasn’t as social as I’d expect normal nights to be.

We did have some reading material: one of those holistic alternative medicine magazines. Though looking at some of the ads I wonder if I’m in the wrong industry, there was a guy doing “clearing services” whereby you pay him to come and remove negative energy of a property. How fantastic: zero costs, just rock up and wave your arms and talk about room auras and leave in a cloud of money. Completely unethical and bullshit, but hey: the types to hire these people are going to spend it on other equally pointless stuff (homoeopathy etc).

I grabbed Richard Saunders to demo his spoon bending abilities, he comes well equipped with a handful of spoons in his pocket (although he may be a dinner guest that requires counting the silverware after he leaves).

Anyhow, that was my Thursday night.. I’ll be sure to try and make the next one.