Austria Turns to Troll/Hobbit/Wacky Dude to Reduce Accidents
May 28th, 2010
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The Austrian motorway authority ASFINAG has been concerned for some time about a stretch of highway that has experienced a disproportionately high number of accidents in recent years. This is hardly a unique situation, as many highways have areas where the topography or road conditions make for a hazardous area. There are numerous ways that roadway authorities have addressed these problems: installing better guardrails, reducing speed limits, altering the path of the road, improving lighting, installing traffic signals and increasing police patrols have all proven effective in many cases, but apparently Austria felt these were just not magical enough.
That’s why they hired a modern day Druid. Yes, a guy who wears a hood and practices a religion based on old European Neo-Pagan traditions. Although the modern interpretation of what being a “Druid” is may be a little fuzzy, considering that the actual Druids didn’t use metal dowsing rods or concern themselves with phone masts, as the new ones apparently do.
Via the Metro (NOT the Onion):
Druids use rock and magnets to stop road accidents
Austrian authorities say druids have been so successful in dealing with motorway accident blackspots in one area that they plan to extend the project nationwide.
As well as using quartz standing stones to restore the area’s ‘natural energy’, the druids have come up with a cheaper modern-day option – burying plastic slates with magnets in the ground.
Arch druid Ilmar Tessmann was called in as a last resort after a high number of fatal accidents were reported on a straight stretch of motorway near Salzburg.
He said the crashes were caused by radiation from a nearby mobile phone mast disrupting the area’s normal ‘terrestrial’ radiation.
Installing the monoliths has successfully counteracted that, he claimed.
Austrian motorway authority ASFINAG said it was sceptical at first and kept the project a secret. But it went public after the druids’ efforts cut the number of deaths at the notorious crash site from six a year to zero in two years.
Mr Tessmann said: ‘Plastic was not available in ancient times but it seems to work well.’
But he warned: ‘It is a big job. These masts are now spreading negative radiation over 120 to 200 miles.’
Scientists, however, are not convinced.
‘Natural sciences need evidence. ‘Whatever can’t be measured, does not exist,’ Dr Georg Walach from the geophysics department at Leoben University in southern Austria said.
‘These energy lines and their flow cannot be grasped or measured therefore their existence is rejected by scientists.’
But Mr Tessmann claims the proof is in the results. ‘If you ask me to give you a scientific explanation, I can’t, I just know it works, and even critics can’t argue with our success rate,’ he said.
I’m hoping this is some kind of hoax, but it has been reported in other media outlets and, thus far, no reports to refute it have been made. It doesn’t really give much information about the “success” of this guy, other than to say accidents have been reduced. All that is stated is “the number of deaths at the notorious crash site from six a year to zero in two years.” Does this mean that there have been zero deaths in the past two years? Is it saying there have been zero deaths thus far in 2010? I’m not sure.
Either way, this could just be a fluke or it could be that people are slowing down to see why the hell there’s a Lord Of the Rings-looking guy crouching down on the side of the road.
Do I even need to explain all the reasons this is scientifically bunk? For one thing, cell phone towers do not produce some unknown, mystical force. They produce UHF radio signals, a well understood and measurable phenomena. These signals are line of sight, so they don’t propagate out “over 120 to 200 miles.” Any force or influence that exists and has effects can be measured. If it has effects on the observable world, those effects can be measured. Even if those effects are small and not obvious, the use of controls and statistical analysis can be used to measure it.
UPDATE:
Having done some more research on this topic, I have discovered that the photo of the hooded guy crouching with the dowsing rods is not actually the individual in question here. It may be that the Mirror just used this photo as an illustration. In reality, Ilmar Tessmann is a 78 year old man who does not wear a hooded cloak and doesn’t have a beard. Other than that, however, the story is otherwise true. Believe it or not, Ilmar Tessman has been doing this for a while. He a practicing Druid who claims to be able to use ancient mysticism to improve the safety of roadways and other locations. He has been hired by Austrian and German road construction companies and even government authorities to improve roadways with his various rituals.
Another article, written in German can be found here. A Google translation can be found here.
Apparently this is not just limited to a single roadway, but rather he has successfully sold his services as a consultant many times. Ilmar Tessman is to a civil engineer what a homeopath is to a physician.
This entry was posted on Friday, May 28th, 2010 at 6:51 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Just LAME, Not Even Wrong, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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May 28th, 2010 at 7:52 pm
A common assumptions about the druids was that they were just the priests of the Celtic peoples. The reality is that the term encompassed all members of the Celtic learned class. There function was to act as repository of knowledge in an oral tradition. Modern attempts at reconstructing the religious practices of the druids are utterly fraudulent, as none of it is backed up by historic evidence. Thus modern Druids have no direct connection to the Druids of the past.
What is shameful about these modern fantasies of Druidism, is that if indeed the real druids were the intellectual cast of the Celtic culture, they would certainly have included people we would now recognise as scientists, and other rational thinkers. Were they to see how modern nit-wits had debased their calling, I’m sure it would sadden them deeply.
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May 28th, 2010 at 7:58 pm
Most of those Neo-Pagan groups like Wicca or those who call themselves “Druids” and the like are just modern inventions that string together some of the stereotypical traits of the old pagans combined with a big dose of modern mysticism bull****.
It’s all the same really. Just a bunch of EMO/psuedo-gothlings who spent too much time at a Renascence Fair or playing Dungeons and Dragons and like to pretend they can cast spells.
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May 28th, 2010 at 10:13 pm
AS silly as this is it does not surprise me that much. There is a huge push in Austria for more government support of “natural” and “holistic” approaches and things that “work with nature.” I know that has nothing to do with this, but you would be surprised. It starts with alternative energy then organic agriculture and before you know it, the whole thing has spiraled to homeopathy and then you have guys blessing roads and dowsing for bad energy.
What is so idiotic is that most people there would not have a huge problem with this but would be up in arms if a Catholic priest or Protestant minister got government money to bless or exorcise a road for safety. Those religions are now seen as being too traditional and mainstream and they don’t have that warm fuzzy newage hippie appeal. It’s ironic because now they’re not even mainstream, all things considered. Plus, this druid guy talks the right talk saying things like “radiation,” which is the big boogie man. He also throws in some psuedoscience crap by using magnets and dowsing rods.
In some ways this is comparable to the mass adoption of homeopathy by so much of western society in the last 25 years. Somehow we got to this point and I wonder how.
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May 28th, 2010 at 11:23 pm
“Installing the monoliths has successfully counteracted that, he claimed.” Nonsensical monoliths by the road would definitely make me slow down, especially if they looked artistically interesting. Even if there isn’t anything to his claims of how it works, if they guy is doing something that saves lives by making people slow down on what they might not realize is a dangerous stretch of road then I say he’s fine. (If the reason for the danger were obvious then I presume it would have been addressed directly.) Still, it would probably be cheaper to reduce the speed-limit with a sign that gives the new speed-limit, says “Mysteriously dangerous road”, and has a picture of Cthulu.
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May 28th, 2010 at 11:31 pm
I’m just as likely to believe it is a coincidence or perhaps other measures that resulted in less accidents. Usually roadside distractions cause more harm than good. They may make people slow down, but also make them take their eyes off the road.
For example, naked women have been known to cause accidents. I’m not even kidding. A woman flashes her boobies and people do slow down to take a look, but they do so fast enough to cause a pileup or they don’t look at the road. Also, less dramatic examples are things like accident rates increasing when a lot of flashy billboards are installed.
Without any evidence that he has done anything useful it may just be that they had a lucky year.
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May 29th, 2010 at 6:23 am
Q, I think what’s going on here is simply mean reversion. I suspect that accident statistics vary spuriously from quarter to quarter with a large degree of noise. I also suspect that they only call in the druids when they notice a big deviation in this quarter’s accident statistics for some road. Since that kind of event is relatively rare, odds are you will see an improvement in the next quarter.
People who have a chronic ailment that fluctuates randomly in severity(e.g. fibromyalgia, manic-depression) suffer from this effect as well. When do you seek help? When you’re feeling unusually ill. Just by the statistics then an improvement is probable even if the supposed treatment does nothing at all.
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June 1st, 2010 at 4:31 am
Firstly, I’m not sure I’d regard six deaths a year as especially high. In fact, that’s really the biggest hole here.
Six deaths a year really isn’t a lot. In principle, one accident could provide you six deaths in a year without much hassle. Take one late night, one tired truck driver, one car full off youths who’ve had a night out on the beers and are blasting it home down the motorway and you can pick up a handful in no time at all.
More useful would be to find out if the number of actual accidents has changed very much – because those drunken twentysomethings could just as easily have a near miss and end up on the verge, bruised but very much alive. In general, I’d expect accident stats to show less noise than fatalities as fatal accidents often require certain factors to combine (pick a handful from: non-use of seatbelts, an old/unsafe car, loss of control of a large vehicle, excessive speed, driving under the influence, etc.).
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June 1st, 2010 at 3:14 pm
Picking on the Metro is rather easy though. It’s a free newspaper pressed into the hands of commuters too dimwitted to say no, and will print any old nonsense so long as it gets eyeballs to their advertisers. It’s part of the same group that produces the Daily Heil and other fishwrap.
The Onion is much more intelligent than the Metro. It knows what irony is, for a start.
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