I wanted to know if this same method can be used to make casts of animal bones as well: someone I know has just found a deer skull, complete with antlers, and I wanted to to make a cast of it for a future project.

active ? yes, up to a point – wish it was more active though
how can we convince more people to contribute ? how about the satisfaction that you then belong to the top 5% of clever cloggs ?

http://marker.to/SdGPOk

A quick intro into the fallacy of dowsing:

Dowsing is one of those pseudoscientific practices that is easy for anyone to believe in if they don’t take the time and make the effort to think critically about it. But let’s take a look at what it is you’ve written on the subject.

“In my opinion – the truth is somewhere in between.”

This is what philosophers call an argument to moderation, also known as a false compromise or the golden mean fallacy. Basically, the person making the argument is asserting that given two positions there exists a compromise between them that must be correct. On the face of it, such an argument seems reasonable as long as a gray area is preferred or desired. It doesn’t work, however, for an argument like, “some think humans can fly; others think they plummet; therefore some people can survive a drop from the Empire State Building.” Another example: “mercury is toxic and harmful; mercury is nutritious and beneficial; therefore the truth is somewhere in between.”

“Dowsing is not as yet scientifically proven…”

Nor is traveling faster than the speed of light. But both alternatives have been scientifically shown not to have credibility. Science has demonstrated that dowsers do no better than chance regardless of who the “operator, or dowser” is. No “dowser” has ever shown an ability to actually detect changes in an electromagnetic field. Indeed, several studies have put dowsers to the test (http://goo.gl/ppBmy; http://goo.gl/aR8Tz).

“Dowsing is a technique that allows us to observe the info our own bodies obtain.”

This is one of those vague-but-feel-good statements that people like to make but really doesn’t impart anything meaningful. Our bodies receive information in various ways, but there is no mechanism shown to exist between an object held in a “dowser’s” hand and the ability to “observe” that information. If there truly is electromagnetic information being transmitted, then the body can do nothing with it unless it’s modulated to a format we can understand. Radio waves pass through us all the time an they often contain information, but we don’t “observe” that information in its EM form. Thankfully. Otherwise we’d have a television, radio, and wifi nightmare 24/7.

Dowsing really isn’t accurate in any hands. Indeed, “competent hands” for dowsing implies the ability to deceive (either others or oneself) since dowsing relies on the ideomotor effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideomotor_effect), a phenomenon that *does* have scientific support. But perhaps “scientific” isn’t something that holds meaning since you did, early in the post, use the phrase “so called scientific instruments,” which indicates a willingness to discount science and reject it. Or at least to doubt that an instrument of science is actually what it is purported to be.