Does the Shroud of Turin Show Expected Elongation of the Head in 2D?"

[pgwenthold]

"Shroudies"? You mean experts with advanced degrees and/or training in physics, chemistry, graphics, forensics, fabric, photography, etc.?

Experts in what?

For the record, I have an advanced degree (PhD) in chemistry.

So my opinion is just as valid as theirs, right? Yet, you don't accept that.

This is the problem. Your acceptance of their conclusions is not based on their expertise or advanced degrees. You accept them because they are shroudies.

I will note, I don't really want you to accept my opinion merely because I have an advanced degree. Just as I don't think you should accept theirs.

 

[catsmate]

Wow, more straw than a pioneer bunk bed.

BTW, thanks for that phrase @JayUtah it had the desired effect when I used it.

 

[Gulliver Foyle]

First, why is homogeneity important in radiocarbon dating, you claimed it was irrelevant. Care to revise that statement.

Second, if you have already debunked Casabianca, why did you claim you are still working on it? Which is it? Still working or debunked?
I still haven't seen your rebuttal of it.

Are you sure you know why the 95% confidence interval is used? I do, and don't tell me I don't. I have not taken any statistics courses, all the statistics I know I learned in other science classes and on the job.

Damon et al are suspect for other reasons than their posting a failing chi^2 test without pointing that out. They withheld the data for almost 30 years until Casabianca used a FOIA to get the data. That damages their credibility a lot.

If you know why the 95% confidence is used then tell us. It's not actually that complicated of an answer.

But then again the fact that you don't know why chi squared is a bad test to perform when you've only two data points might mean simple answers are beyond you.

 

[Mojo]

Evidence for a pre-1190 fire that damaged the Lirey cloth in exactly the same places as the 1532 fire

The codex wasn't discovered until 1770, so perhaps it dates from after the 1532 fire.

Incidentally, why would someone depicting the burial of Christ show later damage to the shroud?

 

[Darat]

For those that believe the shroud is the shroud used to cover the body of Jesus:

• Why is the shroud of Turin not the type of shroud that was typical of Jewish burials around 35 CE?
• Why if it is a 2000-year-old atypical shroud could this not have been a shroud that had been wrapped around another person's body?
• Where/what is the provenance that the shroud of Turin is in fact the shroud that wrapped Jesus's body?
• Where was the shroud from around 35 CE to 1100 CE?

 

[Reformed Offlian]

The codex wasn't discovered until 1770, so perhaps it dates from after the 1532 fire.

Incidentally, why would someone depicting the burial of Christ show later damage to the shroud?

Medieval artists couldn't possibly have known how time works. Just like they couldn't possibly have known that wearing a crown of thorns might cause bleeding.

 

[catsmate]

The codex wasn't discovered until 1770, so perhaps it dates from after the 1532 fire.

Incidentally, why would someone depicting the burial of Christ show later damage to the shroud?

AT the risk of being serious, the Codex has been thoroughly dated to the end of the twelfth century.

 

[mikegriffith1]

Here is a very useful and revealing bibliography of peer-reviewed articles on the Shroud of Turin. Joseph Marino updated the bibliography last year. Notice that the anti-authenticity articles are in the distinct minority:

Peer-Reviewed Papers on the Shroud of Turin - a Bibliography

In 1978, the Shroud of Turin Research Project, known as “STURP,” a group of mainly American scientists and most of whom worked in the U.S.’ nuclear and space programs, were given permission to study the Shroud for five days around the clock. Their

www.academia.edu

I quote from Marino's introduction to the bibliography:

In 1978, the Shroud of Turin Research Project, known as “STURP,” a group of mainly
American scientists and most of whom worked in the U.S.’ nuclear and space programs, were
given permission to study the Shroud for five days around the clock. Their mission was to
determine how the image got onto the cloth, no more, no less. They were unable to come up
with an answer, and actually concluded the image was not the product of the artist. Some
skeptics, especially those who were anti-religion, were not pleased with their findings, and
STURP was subsequently often accused of being a group of religious zealots who were out to
prove the Resurrection of Jesus. They were not. Although most were Christian, only a few
could be considered devout; the team included Jews and agnostics as well. As men who built
bombs and help send crafts into space, they were mainly interested in the Shroud from a purely
scientific perspective. Sadly, about half of the team members are now deceased.

Edited by Agatha: 

Trimmed for rule 4. Please follow rule 4 in all future posts.

 

[Thermal]

Here is a very useful and revealing bibliography of peer-reviewed articles on the Shroud of Turin. Joseph Marino updated the bibliography last year. Notice that the anti-authenticity articles are in the distinct minority:

Yes. The anti-authenticity findings were conclusive enough where there is really not much more to say or investigate. Except by the "I want it to be real" crowd who can't let go and keep trying to generate doubt.

If you searched for "Wiccan Magik" I'll betcha you will find more "pro-authenticity" articles by claimed experts than sound scientific debunking. That's pretty much the expected arc.

 

[Darat]

Here is a very useful and revealing bibliography of peer-reviewed articles on the Shroud of Turin. Joseph Marino updated the bibliography last year. Notice that the anti-authenticity articles are in the distinct minority:

Mike you may have missed my earlier posts, a summary is in this post:

For those that believe the shroud is the shroud used to cover the body of Jesus:

• Why is the shroud of Turin not the type of shroud that was typical of Jewish burials around 35 CE?
• Why if it is a 2000-year-old atypical shroud could this not have been a shroud that had been wrapped around another person's body?
• Where/what is the provenance that the shroud of Turin is in fact the shroud that wrapped Jesus's body?
• Where was the shroud from around 35 CE to 1100 CE?

 

[JayUtah]

If you searched for "Wiccan Magik" I'll betcha you will find more "pro-authenticity" articles by claimed experts than sound scientific debunking. That's pretty much the expected arc.

These lists are almost always padded. I went to a random section of the bibliography and saw a lot of publications in Scientific Research and Essays. I read five randomly selected articles published in that online, open-access journal. They merely report on research and technical activities on practically any subject. I checked their "peer review" criteria; they are only checking such things as good grammar, recent references, clearly stated findings, etc. There is no review of methodology, and indeed none of the papers I read actually employed any sort of methodology or tested any hypothesis. They all just say, "We did this thing and are now telling you about it." This has value in science, but to suggest this is rigorous, peer-reviewed testing of scientific hypotheses is a stretch. And this isn't the only body of publication we've addressed in this thread that boils down simply to reporting claims without testing them.

Similarly much of the rest of the bibliography seems to be straightforward reporting of observations (i.e., "We did a systematic examination of the shroud and found this.") or explorations of new methods. These have value in science as well, but as I wrote weeks ago, avoiding the controversial hypotheses is how these authors get their findings into journals. You just have to report them as "what some believe," rather than the hypothesis they're really trying to establish. Some of shroud science is real science, but it avoids the only salient question. Let's be clear: the principal hypothesis regarding the shroud of Turin is whether it is the cloth that wrapped the body of Jesus of Nazareth as Catholics believe. Pretending that there is significant interest in the shroud outside of that hypothesis is misguided. Therefore secular archeology is largely satisfied about it and has moved on to better things.

What is more revealing than peer-reviewed literature is the self-published literature by many of the same authors and their references and associates. The straw man I alluded to previously was the claim that skeptics reject science done by people who also happen to believe in God. That's not factually true. Nor is that an accurate narrative. Skeptics reject science that requires accepting a supernatural religious truth claim as a premise or that convolves its purportedly secular findings with testing supernatural religious truth claims. The frantic attempt to enliven a persecution complex masks what is simply bad science. The science is iffy not because it's being done by people who believe in the supernatural, but because it boils down to misusing science to try to prove those supernatural beliefs that are fundamentally untestable and scientifically improbable on their face. It's just proselytizing using the language of science. Skeptics can see this, and they rightly reject it as useful science.

When they think no one is looking, these authors are less coy about their goal to prove that the shroud is an artifact of an admittedly fully miraculous event from the Bible. Part of the rhetoric of shroud pseudoscience includes the notion that certain scholars were so allegedly impressed by the secular evidence that they become believing Catholics. This says the quiet part loud. I'm sure many of the authors and claimants believe—or want to believe—that they are serious scientists doing serious science on an important question. But this seems very much to be a compartmentalized attitude. Therefore it's projected onto their secular colleagues to allege in them a suspicious disinterest or denial.

 

[bobdroege7]

I said that homogeneity does not play the role in radiocarbon dating that you seem to insist upon. It's not relevant in the way you interpret Casabianca to require. I maintain that. The Ward & Wilson test identifies outliers. What one does with those outliers is a matter of specialized understanding that neither you nor Casabianca seems to regard.

You might be interested in knowing that the Ward & Wilson test has been superseded by a completely different method based on Bayesian inference. What implications do you think that should have for the evaluation of radiocarbon dating results?


Because you didn't understand it the first time around. So we have to try again. I could just say it's rebutted and that the rebuttal clearly goes over your head. But that would be dismissive, mean-spirited, and unsatisfying. Therefore I'm leading you through the preconceptions through which you are wrongly perceiving the logic of the rebuttal so that there can be some hope of progress. You wrongly think I'm making an ad hominem attack on Casabianca. I think this is because you believe the premises of Casabianca's argument are self-evident truths and may not be questioned.


Yes.


Then tell us why Casabianca used it and believed that it was the right thing to do.


I have taken several statistics classes, had my understanding of it tested in a rigorous licensing exam, and remain liable to the public for my ongoing mastery of it. As others have said, you seem to have a rote, mechanical understanding of statistics. That would be consistent with the way you say you learned. You treat some of these parameters as if they were rigid tolerances or specifications in a commercial process. I maintain that your approach is improper for the purposes of discussing Damon and Casabianca. Therefore I'm asking you questions designed to challenge some of the preconceptions you may be operating under and which prevent you from understanding the flaws in Casabianca's paper. Or stated another way, I am teaching you what you didn't learn by not taking statistics classes, and doing so Socratically so that you teach yourself.


Don't change the subject. The subject is Casabianca's paper. The question on the table is why Casabianca used the 95% confidence interval. When you answer that, we'll move on to my next questions.

Look, for radiocarbon dating to be valid, the sample has to be all of the same age. If you have a mix of different aged materials in your sample, you do not get accurate results.

The reason Casabianca used the 95% confidence interval is obvious. If you are as smart as you think you are, then you would not be badgering me with that question.

Casabianca's team also used other statistical methods other than Ward and Wilson.

I am not swallowing the premises of Casabianca whole cloth, but looking at their detailed arguments and their conclusions.

This, from the Casabianca paper:

"Each TS raw and published radiocarbon date indicates a medieval interval for the fabric. Nev-
ertheless, this reasoning would simply assume a constant amount of C-14 atoms among the sub-
samples. This basic assumption is not supported by the heterogeneity of the TS raw data, the
consistent ages of the control samples, the significant statistical trend in the TS radiocarbon dates
and the amount of foreign material found by the laboratories."

These items are things we need to discuss if you are throwing Casabianca under the bus.

 

[catsmate]

Ah, now that you're back @bobdroege7, how about answering the questions put to you?

 

[JayUtah]

The reason Casabianca used the 95% confidence interval is obvious. If you are as smart as you think you are, then you would not be badgering me with that question.

If it's so obvious, then tell us what that reason is.

 

[bobdroege7]

I note, with no surprise whatever, that @bobdroege7 has failed to respond to my request for
1. Evidence of the creation of the Lirey cloth in Italy, such as examples of similar weaves from there that can reliably be shown to be of first century origin. Some reason why such cloth would be used as a burial shroud for an irreverent rabble-rouser in Roman Judea would be nice too.....

2. Evidence for a pre-1190 fire that damaged the Lirey cloth in exactly the same places as the 1532 fire

3. Evidence of a secret radiocarbon testing of the cloth, preferably with a sample of suitable size and an AMS facility that actually existed at the time of the claimed testing....

1. Figure it out, I already told you, it's in the twist.

2. Nope, the earlier fire did not damage the cloth in the same places as the 1532 fire, as there is no evidence of the damage from the 1532 fire in the Pray Codex.

3. I already posted that, and you only need about 1 mg to do a test.

 

[bobdroege7]

If it's so obvious, then tell us what that reason is.

It's the same as used by Damon, and who would use less than 95%?

 

[JayUtah]

It's the same as used by Damon, and who would use less than 95%?

Do you know the reason or not?

 

[sackett]

More straw than a WHAT? Last I heard, damn few pioneers had honest to Jesus bunks, like bedsteads nailed together from SAWN BOARDS! up off the ground. And straw? Where & hell could such a pack o' pilgrims steal any? St. Louis?

Maybe pine straw, if you want to call dead needles by such a name, but comb out the cones and squaw wood and squirrel poop, and then see how much bed ground you got left.

If you gobblers buy your stories about the Early Days from a fancy-wigged city slicker (Barkeep To The Lawyers!), no wonder you think them PostHoleDiggers know all of everything else.

Consarned greenhouse tulips.

 

[bobdroege7]

Do you know the reason or not?

Actually, I don't because the selection is arbitrary.
In certain scientific areas, 95% is nowhere near good enough.

Editing to add, the reason for the 95% is not mentioned in neither the Damon paper nor the Casabianca paper.

 

[JayUtah]

Actually, I don't because the selection is arbitrary.

You can have an arbitrary confidence interval. But the ones used in this work are not arbitrary. They do have meaning. Just perhaps not the meaning you think, or the meaning that would enliven your claim. But you're getting closer.

You reported that Damon et al. used 95%. That's not completely true. They give dates using weighted and unweighted data values for confidence intervals of both 68% and 95% (p. 614, cf. Table 3). Why 68% specifically? Why not 60% or 75% or something like that? Where does the 68 come from? Where does the 95 come from? Why that number?

In certain scientific areas, 95% is nowhere near good enough.

But in other areas, only 68% is good enough. How do you know what's good enough and what isn't? And you're right about 95% not always being good enough. The next figure is the 99% confidence interval. Where does that number come from? Why is it the next step up?

You're the one assuring us that Casabianca can be certain that the radiocarbon data should not be trusted because it doesn't conform to a rigidly drawn line in the sand. You owe us an explanation for where you think that rigidity comes from.