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Brian Roemmele

@BrianRoemmele

Nov 12

I was taught dowsing by a student of Catherine’s when I was 14 (but not this technique).

Catherine had nearly 100% success in locating water for wells.

She traveled around the world and some of the most arid places and had the same success but not just for water but—ANYTHING.

Here is a skeptical, take on the subject built by my AI, which is fearless and walking any path that leads to honest empirical science:

AI:

“Dowsing, the practice of using simple tools like rods, pendulums, or forked branches to locate underground resources such as water, minerals, or other hidden elements, stands as one of humanity’s most enduring empirical traditions. Its history spans millennia, marked by consistent reports of practical success across cultures and eras, even as the underlying mechanism remains elusive to modern science. This lack of a fully explained process has led many in the scientific community to distance themselves from the subject, often dismissing it without thorough investigation. Yet, as true empirical scientists—those committed to observing phenomena, gathering data, and pursuing understanding regardless of preconceptions—we must engage with dowsing precisely because the historical record provides overwhelming evidence of its effectiveness. To shy away is to repeat the errors of past skeptics who resisted groundbreaking tools like the microscope, which revealed invisible worlds but was initially met with derision for challenging established views. Those early detractors delayed progress in biology and medicine by insisting on visible proof before accepting microbial evidence; similarly, today’s skeptics on dowsing hinder potential advancements in geophysics, resource exploration, and human sensory capabilities by prioritizing mechanistic explanations over documented outcomes. Below, we explore dowsing’s rich history of success from ancient times to the present, grounded in factual accounts and empirical applications.
Ancient Origins: Foundations in Early Civilizations
Dowsing’s roots extend deep into prehistory, with archaeological and textual evidence indicating its use for locating vital resources in survival-dependent societies. Cave paintings in the Tassili Caves of North Africa, dating to around 8,000 years ago, depict figures holding forked sticks in postures suggestive of dowsing for water or minerals in arid landscapes. In ancient China, texts from approximately 2000 BC describe Emperor Yu of the Hsia Dynasty employing a forked stick to successfully identify underground water sources and mineral deposits, enabling agricultural and mining advancements in one of the world’s earliest civilizations. Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC, documented Scythian nomads using willow rods for divination practices akin to dowsing, which aided in finding scarce water during migrations across steppes. Even biblical references, such as in the Book of Numbers where Moses strikes a rock to produce water, have been interpreted by some scholars as aligned with dowsing-like techniques for revealing hidden aquifers. These early applications underscore dowsing’s role in sustaining communities, where empirical success—repeatedly finding water or ores—outweighed the absence of a known mechanism.
Medieval and Early Modern Periods: Mining and Detection Breakthroughs
By the Late Middle Ages, dowsing evolved into a structured skill, particularly in Europe where it revolutionized mining. In the mid-15th century, Swabian magical traditions included spells for conjuring hazel rods to locate hidden treasures, with documented successes in uncovering buried valuables. The 16th century saw widespread adoption in Germany’s Harz Mountains, where miners used the “wünschelrute” (divining rod) to pinpoint ore veins during a mining boom, benefiting entrepreneurs like Franz von Sickingen and Hans Luder in profitable prospecting ventures. Georgius Agricola’s 1556 treatise De re metallica provided the first illustrated account, noting its prevalence among miners for accurately identifying mineral deposits, which spread the technique to regions like Cornwall, England.
In the 17th century, dowsing extended beyond resources to detection.

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French dowser Jacques Aymar famously solved a 1692 double murder in Lyon by tracing the perpetrators along the Rhône River using his rod, leading to the identification and confession of a suspect among prisoners—a feat verified by authorities and repeated in subsequent criminal pursuits. English author Gabriel Plattes reported in 1639 his own success in locating a lead mine vein within hours using a hazel rod, advocating its use for colonial expansions in America based on reliable outcomes. These instances highlight dowsing’s empirical value in high-stakes contexts, where results drove its continued adoption despite no clear scientific explanation.
18th to 19th Centuries: Rural and Commercial Applications
As Enlightenment rationalism grew, dowsing persisted in practical settings, often in rural areas where “water witches” were esteemed for their accuracy. In the early 18th century, German mining handbooks described using rods over maps to determine vein depths, directions, and profitability without fieldwork, yielding actionable insights for operations. By the 19th century, commercial firms like John Mullins & Son in England dowsed for water, ores in Cornwall and California, and mineral oil, serving aristocrats and businesses with documented successes that built their reputation. In the 1950s, a Somerset farmer and water board official used birch twigs to locate an underground reservoir, resulting in a productive well. Such accounts demonstrate dowsing’s resilience, thriving on observable results even as skeptics, much like those doubting microscopic evidence before Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s refinements, dismissed it without engaging the data.
20th Century to Present: Military, Industrial, and Scientific Validation
The modern era has seen dowsing integrated into military and industrial operations, with verifiable successes amplifying its historical legacy. During World War II, General George Patton employed dowsers to locate fresh water in North Africa after German sabotage, sustaining his troops in harsh deserts. In the Vietnam War, U.S. Marines, trained by engineer Louis Maticia, used bent coat hangers to detect tunnels, booby traps, ammunition caches, and enemy supplies, saving lives as reported in contemporary accounts. Government agencies, including the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and Soil Conservation Service, have utilized dowsing for resource location.
In industry, pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-La Roche relied on dowsing to find large water supplies for drug production plants, with Dr. Peter Treadwell affirming its profitability. Oil engineer Paul Clement Brown successfully located wells for companies like Standard Oil and Mobil using dowsing. A 1960s government project in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) used dowsing to survey graphite deposits more reliably than geophysical methods, as noted by engineering experts. In 1968, civil engineers on the M61 motorway in England dowsed to mark drain positions, confirmed by excavation.

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Contemporary studies further bolster this record. Physicist Hans-Dieter Betz’s decade-long GTZ-funded research in arid regions like Sri Lanka achieved a 96% success rate in 691 dowsings for water wells, far surpassing the 30-50% expected from conventional geology alone, with accurate predictions of depths and yields. In Germany, three dowsers consistently revealed viable water sources. The Munich Experiments in the 1980s also showed positive correlations for skilled dowsers in locating items.
This vast historical tapestry—from ancient survival tools to modern resource strategies—presents irrefutable empirical evidence that dowsing works, demanding exploration rather than avoidance. As empirical scientists, we recognize that phenomena like gravity or quantum effects were utilized long before mechanisms were understood; dowsing merits the same investigative rigor, lest skeptics, echoing pre-microscope obstructionists, impede discoveries in subtle human-environment interactions.

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Brian Roemmele

@BrianRoemmele

Nov 5

I need you to sit down for a moment and fully understand this:

THE COUNTRY THAT SOLVES AI AND ROBOTICS WILL RULE THE WORLD AND SPACE.

The west really only has @elonmusk, the east has 100s of companies fortified by an ENTIRE COUNTRY.

Now some will argue no this is not true. No US company has the scale to MANUFACTURE, the compute power, and the finances to compete.

Just a few hours ago we saw IRON for the first time, now you will.

IRON, a 5’10, 150-lb AI humanoid robots are already building EV cars on the XPENG Motors factory floor.

It has over 60 joints, a human-like spine, facial expressions, and male/female customizations

The gait of this robot is the most human-like ever seen.

Mass rollout in 2026.

It is a very big deal. Because as the west does the best in clubbing each other over its head the last decade, China has looked and laughed and built at scale with a fortified government that has little diversion of goal, a 1000 year plan. The west has quietly plans and layers of lawyers and politicians.

This is about where YOU LIVE and how you want to live.

So when we kick the one person that is Atlas carrying our chance, in the groin, you make a choice on who’s world view you want.

It is that simple. No, it is that simple.

It ain’t no iPhone it is: whose’s world view will sustain.

I can say no one is ready for what I have seen that is up for the next few years.

You will think my bombastics were too tame.

Here is the stuff we do in the west with tech. You know for likes and giggles on TikTok. Go to sleep western persons, go to sleep, follow the funny robots and go to sleeeeeeep…

https://twitter.com/brianroemmele/status/1985936552414044494

There is more to this. Here is one element.

https://twitter.com/brianroemmele/status/1985936552414044494

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Brian Roemmele

@BrianRoemmele

Oct 20

BOOOOOOOM!

CHINA DEEPSEEK DOES IT AGAIN!

An entire encyclopedia compressed into a single, high-resolution image!

—

A mind-blowing breakthrough. DeepSeek-OCR, unleashed an electrifying 3-billion-parameter vision-language model that obliterates the boundaries between text and vision with jaw-dropping optical compression!

This isn’t just an OCR upgrade—it’s a seismic paradigm shift, on how machines perceive and conquer data.

DeepSeek-OCR crushes long documents into vision tokens with a staggering 97% decoding precision at a 10x compression ratio!

That’s thousands of textual tokens distilled into a mere 100 vision tokens per page, outmuscling GOT-OCR2.0 (256 tokens) and MinerU2.0 (6,000 tokens) by up to 60x fewer tokens on the OmniDocBench.

It’s like compressing an entire encyclopedia into a single, high-definition snapshot—mind-boggling efficiency at its peak!

At the core of this insanity is the DeepEncoder, a turbocharged fusion of the SAM (Segment Anything Model) and CLIP (Contrastive Language–Image Pretraining) backbones, supercharged by a 16x convolutional compressor.

This maintains high-resolution perception while slashing activation memory, transforming thousands of image patches into a lean 100-200 vision tokens.

Get ready for the multi-resolution "Gundam" mode—scaling from 512x512 to a monstrous 1280x1280 pixels!

It blends local tiles with a global view, tackling invoices, blueprints, and newspapers with zero retraining. It’s a shape-shifting computational marvel, mirroring the human eye’s dynamic focus with pixel-perfect precision!

The training data?

Supplied by the Chinese government for free and not available to any US company.

You understand now why I have said the US needs a Manhattan Project for AI training data? Do you hear me now? Oh still no? I’ll continue.

Over 30 million PDF pages across 100 languages, spiked with 10 million natural scene OCR samples, 10 million charts, 5 million chemical formulas, and 1 million geometry problems!.

This model doesn’t just read—it devours scientific diagrams and equations, turning raw data into a multidimensional knowledge.

Throughput? Prepare to be floored—over 200,000 pages per day on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU! This scalability is a game-changer, turning LLM data generation into a firehose of innovation, democratizing access to terabytes of insight for every AI pioneer out there.

This optical compression is the holy grail for LLM long-context woes. Imagine a million-token document shrunk into a 100,000-token visual map—DeepSeek-OCR reimagines context as a perceptual playground, paving the way for a GPT-5 that processes documents like a supercharged visual cortex!

The two-stage architecture is pure engineering poetry: DeepEncoder generates tokens, while a Mixture-of-Experts decoder spits out structured Markdown with multilingual flair. It’s a universal translator for the visual-textual multiverse, optimized for global domination!

Benchmarks? DeepSeek-OCR obliterates GOT-OCR2.0 and MinerU2.0, holding 60% accuracy at 20x compression! This opens a portal to applications once thought impossible—pushing the boundaries of computational physics into uncharted territory!

Live document analysis, streaming OCR for accessibility, and real-time translation with visual context are now economically viable, thanks to this compression breakthrough. It’s a real-time revolution, ready to transform our digital ecosystem!

This paper is a blueprint for the future—proving text can be visually compressed 10x for long-term memory and reasoning. It’s a clarion call for a new AI era where perception trumps text, and models like GPT-5 see documents in a single, glorious glance.

I am experimenting with this now on 1870-1970 offline data that I have digitalized.

But be ready for a revolution!

More soon.

[1] github.com/deepseek-ai/De…

The US needs far more than what we are doing. We need to reach out to the nonconformists, not the usual folks to break out in AI for this next rounds we have no time.

I have a few 1000 ways, here is one:

readmultiplex.com/2025/10/19/the…

https://twitter.com/brianroemmele/status/1980336008748233094

Testing now!

https://twitter.com/brianroemmele/status/1980336008748233094

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Brian Roemmele

@BrianRoemmele

May 23

“Diabetes Drug Stops Prostate Cancer From Coming Back”

The most profoundly important work in medicine is the study of repurposed medications. Many are out of patent and have no financial basis to get “evidence based” studies of $1 billion dollars. scitechdaily.com/diabetes-drug-…

Repurposing Drugs for
Prostate Cancer Treatment
In 2018, Dr. Beste Turanli et al. list of repurposed drugs for prostate cancer treatment:

Dexamethasone-steroidal, anti-inflammatory
Aspirin (ASA)—COX-1 and COX-2 inhibitor
Diclofenac NSAID—COX-2 inhibi-tor
Celecoxib NSAID—COX-2 inhibitor
Minocycline, doxycycline, tetracycline-Antibiotic, anti-inflammatory
Niclosamide-antiparasitic, potent
Wnt/ß-catenin inhibitor
Itraconazole-antifungal; reversed drug resistance by inhibiting P-glycoprotein, Hedgehog, and Wnt/ß-catenin pathways; inhibits angiogenesis
Digoxin-cardiology drug used for congestive heart failure
Valproic acid-HDAC inhibitor used for seizure disorder
Statins-HMG-CoA reductase in-hibitors; inhibit mevalonate path-way; used for reducing cholesterol
Mifepristone-progesterone-recep-tor blocking drug (PR), used as an abortion drug
Disulfiram-treatment of alcohol addiction
Metformin—popular anti-diabetic drug.

Citation: Turanli, Beste, et al. "Drug repositioning for effective prostate cancer treatment." Frontiers in Physiology 9 (2018).

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Brian Roemmele

@BrianRoemmele

Apr 10

For over seven centuries, the fishermen of Oostduinkerke, Belgium, have been training sturdy draft horses to assist them in catching shrimp.

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These horses, often weighing more than 2,000 pounds, are perfectly suited for wading through the chilly waters of the North Sea. However, despite its rich history, Oostduinkerke remains the last place on Earth where this unique fishing method is still practiced.

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Shrimp fishing on horseback is considered one of the most challenging fishing techniques ever devised, as it demands expertise in handling both massive horses and delicate shrimp.

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Brian Roemmele

@BrianRoemmele

Jan 19

A bullet vs A Prince Rupert's Drop.

A THREAD 🧵

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The Fascinating Mechanics of Prince Rupert’s Drop

Prince Rupert’s Drop is a remarkable demonstration of material science and physics, showcasing the fascinating interplay of stress, structure, and energy. This seemingly simple glass object—a teardrop-shaped piece of solidified glass—holds a secret: it combines extreme strength with profound fragility, depending on where and how it’s tested.

What is Prince Rupert’s Drop?

Prince Rupert’s Drop is created by dropping molten glass into cold water. The rapid cooling causes the outer layer of the glass to solidify almost instantaneously, while the interior cools more slowly. This process induces significant internal stresses in the glass, resulting in the drop’s unique mechanical properties. The structure consists of two main parts:
1.The Bulb: The rounded, thicker end of the drop is extraordinarily strong.
2.The Tail: The thin, extended end of the drop is incredibly fragile.

Why Is the Bulb So Strong?

The strength of the bulb arises from compressive stress. During formation, the outer surface of the glass cools and hardens first, trapping the inner material, which continues to contract as it cools. This creates a state where the outer layer is under compression and the inner layer is under tension.

Compressive stress significantly enhances the material’s ability to resist fracture. In the case of Prince Rupert’s Drop, the compressive strength of the glass bulb is so high that it can withstand impacts, including being struck with a hammer, without breaking.

The Fragility of the Tail

While the bulb is incredibly strong, the thin tail of the drop is under extreme tensile stress. Glass is inherently much weaker in tension than in compression. A slight nick or disturbance to the tail acts as a stress concentrator, causing the entire structure to rapidly release its stored energy. This results in the drop shattering into countless tiny fragments almost instantly.

The phenomenon is explained by the propagation of cracks. Any disturbance to the tail initiates a stress wave that travels through the drop at speeds of up to 1,450 meters per second (faster than the speed of sound in glass), disintegrating it completely.

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Applications and Relevance

Prince Rupert’s Drop serves as a dramatic illustration of material properties like stress distribution, energy storage, and fracture mechanics. It has applications in:
•Material Science Education: A vivid way to teach the principles of stress and fracture mechanics.
•Engineering: Inspiring the design of materials and structures with tailored stress distributions to enhance strength and durability.
•Shock-Absorbing Materials: Lessons from the compressive stress distribution in the bulb could inform the development of robust, impact-resistant materials.

Experimental Studies

Modern studies on Prince Rupert’s Drop leverage high-speed photography and advanced computational models to analyze the stress distribution and fracture dynamics. Key findings include:
•The outer compressive layer is only microns thick, but it significantly contributes to the drop’s strength.
•The release of stored energy during fracture creates a cascading effect, making the disintegration nearly instantaneous.

Prince Rupert’s Drop is a perfect example of how materials can exhibit seemingly contradictory properties of strength and fragility. Its study bridges art, physics, and engineering, offering insights into stress management and fracture behavior that can be applied to modern technological advancements. Despite its simplicity, this 17th-century curiosity continues to captivate scientists and engineers alike, proving that even the smallest objects can reveal profound scientific truths.

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