Miracle of the Shroud II: The Second Coming

[Vixen]

Suppose you have a sample of a substance, say a meteorite, and want to know what chemical elements it contains, then you get it analysed and accept the results. The lab you sent it to doesn't produce a random result that has to be replicated 200 times before you can be confident that it is accurate. You may want to get it checked by another lab, bit it's not a random result. That's nonsense.

You have to look at hundreds of people to determine the average height of people in London, but if one of these people is Mr Smith, you can look at that one person and state confidently: Mr Smith has brown hair. You don't need to look at hundreds of other people to determine the truth of that statement.

Surely that's a logic fallacy of self-evident truth, which, translated seems to be, "an expert tested it, so accept his or her infallible conclusion", when it is not necessarily self-evident except the 14C scientists say it is so.

 

[Giordano]

Since noone can agree on its age, send it to, say 200, scientists to get a statistically significant consensus of it.

But the people who did the testing in the Nature paper do agree. Instead of "noone" do you mean that not every single person on Earth agrees on its age? Is that your criteria? And as asked before, if so, do you think that doing 200 more tests would raise that number significantly, let alone to 7 billion?

Perhaps we should devote the required resources to convincing everyone that evolution really happened, or even that the Earth is round; I suspect not everyone agrees to these concepts either.

 

[Slowvehicle]

Um...De...Wesselow. I'm going now.

Is it your contention that de Wesselow's speculations about the CIQ are more puissant than Mme F-L's detailed examinations?

Are you posting in the right thread?

 

[Vixen]

The people who believe in the holy table cloth will never accept any evidence and they have plenty already. If you destroyed the thing tomorrow while testing it and said it was 700 years old, the followers would cry conspiracy and then find the vision of the Virgin Mary in toast or elephant poo and venerate that.

The burnt toast and poo is one person's vision (= hallucination? Epilepsy?).

The shroud does not fall in that category.

 

[Slowvehicle]

The human brain comes off an automated conveyor belt in a robot controlled factory?

Is there any chance that you might explain this?

It certainly resembles that sarcasm that you claim you "don't do".

 

[abaddon]

That was humour.

Well we shall simply add it to the ever growing list of things you fail to comprehend.

 

[Giordano]

AIUI they could not agree on which part of the cloth. There was allegedly no witnesses when the samples were put in sealed containers. The samples all came from one part of the cloth.

Do you understand why some people were not satisfied?

Wrong again: they did ultimately agree on the part to be sampled.. Virtually everything was actually done with a strong emphasis on maintaining transparency. I believe even believe that the actual sampling was video taped.

Didn't you maintain that the weave of the cloth was so distinctive that it reduced the blinding portion of the test for 2 out of 3 of the labs (the 3rd lab ashed the sample first to eliminate even this clue)? Now are you suggesting that the samples weren't really from the samples themselves due to some slight of hand of the Church officials? Even given the distinctive weave of the Turin cloth, why would they try to substitute a cloth from the wrong date?

 

[Slowvehicle]

You said all our fantastic advanced technology is due to science.

I said the high-tech is thanks to the human brain.

Not created by scientists.

You do know that scientists, like other humans, do breed, right?

The brains of at least some scientists are "created" by scientists, or a scientist and a layperson. The others are "created" by two laypersons.

In either case, it's a pretty low-tech process...

 

[Sideroxylon]

Surely that's a logic fallacy of self-evident truth, which, translated seems to be, "an expert tested it, so accept his or her infallible conclusion", when it is not necessarily self-evident except the 14C scientists say it is so.

Positioning yourself with expert concensus in an area you are not an expert is prudent intellectual honesty. Egalitarian ideas about knowledge are for fools.

 

[Craig B]

Surely that's a logic fallacy of self-evident truth, which, translated seems to be, "an expert tested it, so accept his or her infallible conclusion", when it is not necessarily self-evident except the 14C scientists say it is so.

I t is nothing of the sort. I'm stating that such tests are scientific findings about the object tested. If you think a mistake has been made, get it checked. Fine. Go to the doctor. Get a second opinion. But do you consult 200 doctors before you believe the diagnosis that three of them independently concur in making?

 

[Slowvehicle]

Dinwar, I get it you are a carbon dating professional.

What I do not get is your insistence the cloth should not be retested, given your scientific objectivity. It should not worry you.

You appear to be conflating "need not be", and "realistically, will not be", with "should not be".

Is this intentional? Does it represent naïvete, disingenuousness, or dishonesty?

 

[Vixen]

Do you accept that organisms have as a matter of fact evolved? I'm not sure what your position is on this.

We can see adaptation and natural selection. We have species and sub species. We have genii, genomes, DNA.

Clearly we are organically related to other living things.

But, did we go through a progression of primaeval soup = amoeba like cell = fish = frog = reptile = bird with various branchings off into = mammals = primates, of which family we belong. Homo sapiens came out of Africa and there is a "missing link" that directly connects us to other primates.

However, did we once swing from trees to slowly change into humans? I believe humans have always been humans. I think Genesis is pretty accurate as the creation story.

 

[Slowvehicle]

This is nonsense. At this risk of critique from Dinwar, I'm going to explain this to you. N14 is floating along in the upper atmosphere minding it's own business. All of a sudden, (cue theme to Fantastic Fore Movie) cosmic rays hit it and without so much as a by your leave turns, it into C14. The N14 was happy and feeling fulfilled in it's life as nitrogen. So, it goes an a long quest entering living organisms and radiating energy like subplots in a road trip movie, trying to get back to that place it was before (cue the Eagles). As it radioactively decays the carbon converts back to nitrogen and we measure the ratio of nitrogen to carbon. As we know the rate of radioactive decay we can determine when whatever the organic material is stopped ingesting C14. If the rate of decay was unknown we might have to take an average. However it's not, so we don't.

You are one of my heroes.

 

[Giordano]

That was an example of why you need an adequate sanple size. Any fule kno height is radically different from a cloth.

I did sampling myself for my psychology lab reports and in desiging an attitude test. One of the final exams was in applied statistics, as it is no good designing an experiment and claiming your results are meaningful, if you haven't followed the accepted procedures.

In this case, you had back results from three laboratories. They seemed to agree the date was between 900 and 1200. However, with just three, how do you know it is not just pure chance. For example, if you roll a dice, you expect a 1/6 chance of any particular number. So to predict you will get three x one number, you can see that would be 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/16.

The fact that it happens doesn't mean it didn't happen purely by luck (as it did).

The more labs testing, the higher the probabilty the result is significant, and not just due to random chance.

Caveat: as AMS is based on hard science, there is a lower margin of expected error, given it is based on predictable natural laws.

I will repeat a prior post's suggestions: read up on statistics, don't take "our" word for it. You first state that you did statistics yourself in your classes, and realize that measuring heights calls on different statistics from 14C measurements. But then you continue to post as if there is no difference in the statistics required.

The spread of the numbers itself when a test is done repeated times (in this case 6 times) tells you the likelihood that any given result was just by chance, and how far the results from a repeat of the test are likely to stray due to random chance.

 

[Slowvehicle]

No. Say you have a normal distribution, such as height. If your sampling doesn't give you a bell-shaped curve, there is likely an error in your sampling.

This is why we are advised to find a random sample of, say 200, in a cross section of the population, as a minimum figure if you want your figures to be reasonably accurate.

Think. If 200 people accurately, and competently, measure the height of a single person, your "bell curve" will disappear within significant figures and your margin of error.

 

[Slowvehicle]

One of the criticisms of the 1988 tests is that only three labs were involved.

So, increase the number of labs testing. If your hypothesis is robust, i.e., the shroud is dated 1260, why should you be resistant to retesting?

The Vatican can afford it.

In the immortal words of Hawk:

"Can don't mean want to."

 

[Sideroxylon]

We can see adaptation and natural selection. We have species and sub species. We have genii, genomes, DNA.

Clearly we are organically related to other living things.

But, did we go through a progression of primaeval soup = amoeba like cell = fish = frog = reptile = bird with various branchings off into = mammals = primates, of which family we belong. Homo sapiens came out of Africa and there is a "missing link" that directly connects us to other primates.

However, did we once swing from trees to slowly change into humans? I believe humans have always been humans. I think Genesis is pretty accurate as the creation story.

Take it to an evolution thread. Look forward to it.

 

[Vixen]

Think. If 200 people accurately, and competently, measure the height of a single person, your "bell curve" will disappear within significant figures and your margin of error.

The joke wasn't even funny the first time.

 

[Slowvehicle]

I didn't. I reiterated the concerns <whisper it> De Wesselow reiterated in his book. I made no such hyperbole about your industry being incompetent and negligent.

My view is, if people cannot accept the 1988 results, then why not test it again?

Who is it, in your opinion, that, based upon practical,empirical, non-apologetic, non-anecdotal, objective evidence "cannot accept" the results of the "most scrutinized bit of ¹⁴C dating ever"?

How, in your opinion, would more testing work to convince this group?

 

[Slowvehicle]

No. I explained if you want to find out the average height of a population you need a reasonably large sample, minimum random 200. We know height is a normal distribution, so we can tell if our sampling is accurate by how well it correlates to the Gaussian curve.

The CIQ is a "population" of 1.

As has been pointed out to you.