Reformed Offlian
Master Poster
Did you notice what year KCCAMS started operating?
Does the Shroud of Turin Show Expected Elongation of the Head in 2D?"
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catsmate
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What in the name of holy, unholy or atheistic are you ranting about now? Other than spewing more straw in a desperate, pathetic, attempt to convince yourself of a non-existent secret radiocarbon test.
All of which has been covered before.
Yes, your attempt to reintroduce material covered previously, and debunked, has been noted.
catsmate
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Yeah. The level of nonsense @bobdroege7 has resorted to in order to try and prop up the pathetic nonsense of Case is staggering. He seems to assume everyone here is as gullible as him.
While a simple email to UC would resolve the matter..... Of course if the response didn't support his nonsense @bobdroege7 would probably accuse them of lying.
Have you noticed he's refused to address the sample size for the alleged secret AMS test? And has gone quiet about the 'herringbone' weave?
catsmate
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As long as Indigo is there.
Helen
Implicitly explicit
Of course. It is such a special colour.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
[delete]
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JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
On the contrary, I regret that I am not always able to read your mind and thereby determine which of the many ways to misunderstand statistical analysis you will favor us with on any given day. Obviously despite my last message, your mystification over multimodal distributions continues undeterred. You are right to expect radiocarbon dates to be normally distributed. However, when those dates are calibrated to calendar dates—accounting for the varying amount of 14C in the atmosphere throughout history—the result is not normally distributed. The resulting distribution is instead multimodal. It doesn't matter which confidence band you "object" to; they all belong to the same distribution. The different modes aren't severable.
If you have a pair of 2σ confidence bands—let's say 100-200 CE and 350-500 CE—arising from a calibration, you can identify them on the x-axis of a probability mass function as
But the correct way to interpret their multimodal distribution is not
Instead, it's
Multimodal distributions are the norm for calibrated calendar dates in radiocarbon dating. Attached you can see the radiocarbon dating report for several samples form an excavation for engineering purposes I was involved with in Farmington, Utah a few decades ago—roughly the same era as the shroud test. Note how most of the dozen-ish samples sent for dating have multimodally-distributed calendar dates. Note also the notation about possibly having to compensate for the increase in 14C as the result of above-ground nuclear weapons testing in my state back in the day.
This was in the early 1990s, using a much later revision of the software than was available in 1988. As such, we had the luxury of weighting estimates giving the likely amplitude of each mode in the distribution. Leese, writing in 1986, notes that at that time there was no good agreement on how to reckon the contribution of each mode to the overall distribution, as is given in our report. Hence no such balancing was attempted in the shroud dating, which remained scientifically conservative on that point. Leese notes, however, that various forms of estimation were possible—some empirical, some purely probabilistic. These are referred to in our report as Method A, Method B, and so on.
What you need to come to terms with is that we can tell that you're bluffing your way along in a discussion with people who actually have to do this for their jobs and who know the science and the math inside and out. You don't know radiocarbon dating. You don't know statistics. Yet you're arrogantly convinced every single day that you've found some smoking gun that proves the shroud dating is "obviously" wrong. As I said before, you either need to take some serious time off and grapple with the actual complexity of the sciences you're Googling your way through, or admit the obvious—that you're in over your head.
It's hard to know where to begin to tell you everything that's wrong with this statement.
First, and most obvious: "incompatible" is not a thing here. That a true value will gravitate toward one mode or another in a multimodal distribution is the intended behavior of the distribution—and, in fact, of any distribution.
Second, the modes are not somehow mistakes or missteps. They are simply reflections of a thoroughly irreconcilable ambiguity in the underlying phenomenon. Something with a certain amount of 14C can either be a young object that hasn't undergone as much radioisotopic decay, or it may be an old object that was around when there was a lot of 14C around. That the math gives you two or more answers doesn't mean someone messed up and needs to be chastised for it. Just because some functions in math, for example, have more than one zero—and that only one of them may be the right answer to the problem—doesn't mean that algebra is trying to hide something.
Third, that the shroud is documented to have been witnessed in a certain year doesn't preclude that it didn't exist much earlier. More importantly, radiocarbon dating tells you when the flax was harvested, not when the thread was spun, not when the cloth was woven, not when the image was created, and not when it was finally written about by someone whose writings persisted. You're trying to narrow the goalposts in a particularly ridiculous way. It's not valid history, it's not valid science, and it's not valid statistics.
No, you're just projecting your confusion onto Christen. Exclusion isn't a thing here. There is no concept in the interpretation of multimodal distributions for "excluding" a mode. There is only the concept of the most likely value gravitating toward one or the other of the available modes. That other factors may contribute in your estimation of where the true value most likely lies within your multimodal distribution does not make the radiocarbon methods or the statistical methods somehow inaccurate, or indicate that they were somehow done incorrectly. Nor does it provide any justification for misstating the statistical outcome by omitting a mode that you think (for other reasons) shouldn't apply. It would have been highly dishonest for Damon et al. to not report a confidence band that was generated by the calibration.
I referred to Christen to establish two points that were material to my rebuttal of Casabianca. First, to dispel the notion that there is a single, God-given statistical model that definitively answers a given question. Hence, there will never be a "slam-dunk" based on statistical analysis, so stop looking for one and stop believing others when they desperately tell you they have one. Second, statistical norms are not applied as inflexibly as you are trying to do—neither generally in radiocarbon dating nor specifically in the case of the shroud. You get points for at least seeking out and reading what I cite to. But you lose all those points and more when it appears your interest in the material rises no higher than mining it for the next day's desperate ploy for yet another poorly-informed, slam-dunk smoking gun. Try to imagine a reality in which all the world's scientists are not conspiring to hide the truth about the shroud of Turin.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Unless you had all those URLs memorized, you're obviously Googling for the answers. It's not at all hard to see this. You admitted in one case that you had to Google for the answer to one of my questions. That was obvious anyway, since I had to keep feeding you hints until there was enough on board for a Google hit to give you the answer. But then you had to thread a needle by saying you Googled for something, but you somehow knew it all along, and it was somehow irrelevant anyway. I suppose that must have somehow made sense in your head. Then when I asked you another question in a way that you couldn't just Google an answer, you couldn't come up with anything.
I taught this kind of stuff to college students. I can tell when someone is being a student. I can tell when someone is groping their way along, trying to put the concepts together. Normally it's very satisfying when a student finally puts it all together and it "clicks" for them. The problem is that you're not trying to learn for the sake of acquiring useful information. You're trying to make do with as little as you can get away with—garnished with gales of bluster—to keep your desired belief on life-support. And I suspect that you don't even really care that much about the shroud of Turin. You're trying to get away with as little as possible just so you can maintain the illusion that you're smarter than the average sheeple about something.
But since you're just now—in this thread—coming to terms with some of the most elementary concepts in quantitative scientific reasoning, the insinuation is simply not credible that you're a scholar with decades of seasoning.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
And you have just as much interest in defending this claim as you did the last time you brought it up.
This isn't even interesting science. It ranks just slightly above, "Cool story, bro." All it shows is that if you interactively control the wavelength and intensity of the energy of your laser, you can slightly brown some cloth. There's no reason to suppose the exact wavelength in question has any natural or supernatural significance. It's just the one the experimenters showed produced the effect they were seeking. Any attempt to connect that to something else with a different premise automatically becomes circular reasoning. And there's no reason to suppose the exact intensity has any natural or supernatural significance, for the same reason. It's interesting only in that it's several billion times more intense than the sun and is therefore unlikely to arise by natural means. Any suggestion that these carefully, interactively, HARKishly chosen parameters have any bearing upon any kind of physics-based hypothesis for the shroud image formation is entirely circular.
And no, that's not overcome by the supposedly impeccable credentials of the people fiddling with the controls of the laser. It doesn't suddenly make this good science. It never rises above a bunch of people with credentials idly frobbing the laser controls and gazing at their navels.
As with the worst shroud pseudoscience, this is either just a veiled attempt to prove a Christian truth claim with sciency-sounding language or to think of someplace sciency-sounding to go if you assume a Christian truth claim as true. In order for this to have anything useful to do with the shroud of Turin, you either have to assume the Christian truth claims about the resurrection—and a whole lot of pseudo-physics speculation about how it "must" have operated—and thereby conclude that the laser experiment proves the Catholic claim about the shroud image production, or you have to take it as a premise that the shroud image was produced by a resurrection and tell yourself that now you've ginned up a sciency-sounding reason to think you know how resurrection now works. You see both of those lines of reasoning in shroud literature, either lurking in the background or sometimes stated right up front.
Reformed Offlian
Master Poster
So maybe a medieval artist made it using an "Archimedes death ray"-type setup? Makes at least as much sense as anything you probably have in mind.
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mikegriffith1
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I'm recommending this article because, though written by a skeptic, it acknowledges that the Shroud's image is a photographic negative and that it could not have been made with pigments, dyes, staining compounds as claimed by Walter McCrone. The article is titled "Verification of the Nature and Causes of the Photo-negative Images on the Shroud of Lirey-Chambéry-Turin." It was written by Nicholas P. Allen, who was a professor of art and design at the Port Elizabeth Technikon in South Africa.
Allen claimed that using technology that was "available" to medieval societies, he was able to duplicate the unusual aspects of the Shroud's image. He freely acknowledged that the image is a photographic negative. He theorized that photography was actually discovered between 1200 and 1350 AD, that photographic technology was used to create the Shroud's image, that all evidence of this alleged early discovery of photography vanished, and that everyone thinks photography wasn't discovered until the earth 19th century because of the alleged disappearance of all evidence of its earlier discovery in medieval times. His claim that he duplicated all aspects of the Shroud's image has been refuted, but I think his article is worthwhile because it admits things that other skeptics deny.
Here is one of the several parts of the article where Allen admits the Shroud's image is a photographic negative:
The Shroud's negative image, once transformed to a positive state by means of modern photography (ct. (1)), is highly detailed, which has allowed medical experts to claim that they are able to detect the presence of such details as rigor mortis, contusion wounds, excoriations and a variety of facial wounds (Barbet 1950: 23-45). It should also be considered that without the medium of modern photography it is uncertain if anyone living before c 1898 could have seen these details (that is when Secondo Pia made his historic photographic negatives of the Shroud). . . .
The image is a negative which is as visually coherent as a positive photograph when its tonal polarity is reversed. . . .
It should be noted that most researchers have at some time or another remarked on the surprising photographic nature of the Shroud's image and it is accepted by all that in every way the Shroud acts as a negative photographic plate.
Allen explains why McCrone's theory is untenable:
Even if an artist were able to apply some staining compound that contained a proportion of red ochre, as was suggested by McCrone, the fibrils would be stained throughout. One must also ask how an 'artist' could possibly view what he/she were painting/staining since the image is so subtle that it can only be clearly discerned from some distance. In short, any solution to image formation on the Shroud of Turin which insisted on the employment of pigments, dyes and staining compounds would have to explain why the artist/s concerned would have wanted to produce an image (complete with anatomically accurate details) in the negative, such that its visual information was largely inaccessible to its proposed viewing audience at the time of this manufacture.
Allen introduces his claim that he duplicated the Shroud's image using technology that was "available" in medieval times:
Since 1990 the author has formally conducted a number of experiments which have employed the kind of technology available to certain medieval societies c 1200-1350 AD, and has shown that it is quite possible to produce a chemically stable (fixed) negative photographic image of a human corpse on a piece of linen employing only three substances, all of which were available to people living well before the thirteenth century. These substances are quartz (rock-crystal), the silver salts (specifically silver nitrate (eau prime and silver) and/or silver sulphate (oil of vitriol and silver) and ammonia (urine) (Allen 1993a: 23-32; 1993b; 1994: 62-94).
Allen's claim that the Shroud is actually the only evidence that photography was discovered long before everyone thinks it was:
If re-photographed (by more conventional means), these negative images on linen may be viewed in the positive (4), in which they reveal a wealth of detail not normally available to the human eye. This phenomenon quite clearly conforms very closely to the characteristics of the image as found in the Shroud of Turin (cf. 5) and if this hypothetical account is in any way accurate, it strongly implies that the Shroud of Turin may be the only extant example of a lost photographic technology which is normally assumed to have been first discovered in the early nineteenth century by such people as Thomas Wedgwood and Sir Humphry Davy. (https://www.academia.edu/79715703/V...Images_on_the_Shroud_of_Lirey_Chambéry_Turin; https://doi.org/10.1080/00043389.1995.11761214)
Allen claimed that using technology that was "available" to medieval societies, he was able to duplicate the unusual aspects of the Shroud's image. He freely acknowledged that the image is a photographic negative. He theorized that photography was actually discovered between 1200 and 1350 AD, that photographic technology was used to create the Shroud's image, that all evidence of this alleged early discovery of photography vanished, and that everyone thinks photography wasn't discovered until the earth 19th century because of the alleged disappearance of all evidence of its earlier discovery in medieval times. His claim that he duplicated all aspects of the Shroud's image has been refuted, but I think his article is worthwhile because it admits things that other skeptics deny.
Here is one of the several parts of the article where Allen admits the Shroud's image is a photographic negative:
The Shroud's negative image, once transformed to a positive state by means of modern photography (ct. (1)), is highly detailed, which has allowed medical experts to claim that they are able to detect the presence of such details as rigor mortis, contusion wounds, excoriations and a variety of facial wounds (Barbet 1950: 23-45). It should also be considered that without the medium of modern photography it is uncertain if anyone living before c 1898 could have seen these details (that is when Secondo Pia made his historic photographic negatives of the Shroud). . . .
The image is a negative which is as visually coherent as a positive photograph when its tonal polarity is reversed. . . .
It should be noted that most researchers have at some time or another remarked on the surprising photographic nature of the Shroud's image and it is accepted by all that in every way the Shroud acts as a negative photographic plate.
Allen explains why McCrone's theory is untenable:
Even if an artist were able to apply some staining compound that contained a proportion of red ochre, as was suggested by McCrone, the fibrils would be stained throughout. One must also ask how an 'artist' could possibly view what he/she were painting/staining since the image is so subtle that it can only be clearly discerned from some distance. In short, any solution to image formation on the Shroud of Turin which insisted on the employment of pigments, dyes and staining compounds would have to explain why the artist/s concerned would have wanted to produce an image (complete with anatomically accurate details) in the negative, such that its visual information was largely inaccessible to its proposed viewing audience at the time of this manufacture.
Allen introduces his claim that he duplicated the Shroud's image using technology that was "available" in medieval times:
Since 1990 the author has formally conducted a number of experiments which have employed the kind of technology available to certain medieval societies c 1200-1350 AD, and has shown that it is quite possible to produce a chemically stable (fixed) negative photographic image of a human corpse on a piece of linen employing only three substances, all of which were available to people living well before the thirteenth century. These substances are quartz (rock-crystal), the silver salts (specifically silver nitrate (eau prime and silver) and/or silver sulphate (oil of vitriol and silver) and ammonia (urine) (Allen 1993a: 23-32; 1993b; 1994: 62-94).
Allen's claim that the Shroud is actually the only evidence that photography was discovered long before everyone thinks it was:
If re-photographed (by more conventional means), these negative images on linen may be viewed in the positive (4), in which they reveal a wealth of detail not normally available to the human eye. This phenomenon quite clearly conforms very closely to the characteristics of the image as found in the Shroud of Turin (cf. 5) and if this hypothetical account is in any way accurate, it strongly implies that the Shroud of Turin may be the only extant example of a lost photographic technology which is normally assumed to have been first discovered in the early nineteenth century by such people as Thomas Wedgwood and Sir Humphry Davy. (https://www.academia.edu/79715703/V...Images_on_the_Shroud_of_Lirey_Chambéry_Turin; https://doi.org/10.1080/00043389.1995.11761214)
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Sure are a lot of seagulls around this time of year.
catsmate
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Yes indeed. A distinct lack of the moral courage to engage in actual debate.
catsmate
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Interestingly our old friend, fellow forum member, and recovered shroudie, Hugh Farey has a post on his blog called Bayesian Balderdash regarding the mis-use of stats by the shroud "authenticists".
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I got that far. Is the suggestion that photography/photographic effects existed in 32 a.d.?
Seagulls? Reminds me of watching their antics on a pier in California. One of them landed with an improbably big fish in his beak, looked too big to swallow, and man! was he vain about it. A pack of other gulls started pestering him, pecking and flapping and yacking, until he angrily dropped the fish -- HIS fish! -- and tore into them beak, claws, wings, and drove them up the pier. He meant bidness, by gag!
But there was this other gull, one that flew in behind him, landed on the pier, and snapped up that fish and swallowed it immediately. (Never underestimate a Pacific gull's esophagus and how wide it can stretch.) And flew quickly away.
The first gull, having scattered his foes, now turned and came striding back to enjoy his lunch. Until he came to the damp spot on the planks where he'd left it. He looked here, he peered yon, he stood confuzzled -- and yes, a seagull can express a lot with that arrogant head and body.
As we watching apes' relatives broke up in guffaws. Nature is cruel at times.
But there was this other gull, one that flew in behind him, landed on the pier, and snapped up that fish and swallowed it immediately. (Never underestimate a Pacific gull's esophagus and how wide it can stretch.) And flew quickly away.
The first gull, having scattered his foes, now turned and came striding back to enjoy his lunch. Until he came to the damp spot on the planks where he'd left it. He looked here, he peered yon, he stood confuzzled -- and yes, a seagull can express a lot with that arrogant head and body.
As we watching apes' relatives broke up in guffaws. Nature is cruel at times.
Reformed Offlian
Master Poster
A whole flock of them. Who spend their life just wishing.
We showed them evidence that they were wrong, and they ran, they ran so far away.
mikegriffith1
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Bollocks! No, double bollocks! Better yet, infinity bollocks! There! I win!
All kidding aside, I notice not one of you had anything substantive to say about Allen's article, even though he is a skeptic. You don't want "actual debate." Your idea of "actual debate" is to summarily dismiss evidence you can't explain and to dismiss all pro-authenticity scientists as non-scientists because they believe in a supreme being--and then declare yourself the winner and pretend that your arguments aren't being answered. You are so poorly read and biased when it comes to the Shroud that you can't even admit that its image is a photographic negative.
Anyway, for you and others who've been pushing the theory that the Shroud's image is a medieval fabrication, here's a detail refutation of that theory by Mark A. Rivera, a retired physicist who worked for 35 years developing advanced technologies for commercial and military space systems. Rivera has a master's degree in physics from California State University at Long Beach and a bachelor's degree in applied physics from the University of California at Irvine. His article, titled "The Shroud of Turin: A Critical Reassessment of the Medieval Fabrication Hypothesis – Expanded Edition," was published earlier this year. Here's the abstract for the article:
The Shroud of Turin, a linen cloth bearing the faint image of a crucified man, has long been debated as a potential medieval forgery, primarily due to the 1988 radiocarbon dating placing its origin between 1260 and 1390 CE. However, a detailed review and analysis of 47 peer-reviewed scientific and technical papers, supplemented by additional studies, reveals a wealth of evidence that challenges the Medieval Fabrication hypothesis. This article synthesizes findings from imaging, chemistry, forensics, textile analysis, and dating methods to demonstrate that the hypothesis is no longer tenable. The Shroud’s complex features—its superficial image, forensic bloodstains, ancient textile properties, and radiation damage—could not have been produced by medieval technology, and no comparable artifacts exist from that era. Since the
flawed 1988 dating, no scientific evidence beyond speculation has emerged to support fabrication. While this analysis does not seek to prove the Shroud as the burial cloth of Christ, it exposes the weaknesses of the medieval origin narrative and explores its persistence despite overwhelming counter-evidence.
In addition to preserving the original argumentation, we incorporate recent experimental results (2023–2024), address the most common skeptical rejoinders point-by-point, and propose falsifiable predictions for future testing. These enhancements aim to fortify the case against a medieval provenance while inviting open scientific dialogue. (https://www.academia.edu/130285888/...ieval_Fabrication_Hypothesis_Expanded_Edition)