© Stephen E. Jones[1]
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This is my "Editorial and Contents," part #1 of the August 2016 issue of my Shroud of Turin News. Following this editorial, I will add excerpts from Shroud-related August 2016 news articles (if any) in separate posts, linked back to this post, with the articles' words in bold to distinguish them from mine. Click on a link below to go to that article. Articles not yet linked are planned to be commented on in this issue.
Contents:
Editorial.
Editorial. Rex Morgan's Shroud News: My scanning and word- 
processing of issues of Rex Morgan's Shroud News, provided by Ian Wilson, and emailing them to Barrie Schwortz for him to convert to PDF and add to his online Shroud News archive, continued in August up to issue #56, August 1989 [Right (enlarge)]. Issues in that archive are still only up to #50, December 1988 but a mid-September update is imminent.
Topic index: In August I belatedly realised (i.e "didn't think - plan ahead") that some topics in my new 
"The Shroud of Turin blog topics" series will be too long (notably "Medieval photography: Nicholas Allen") to share a page with other topics, and also then a topic may be harder to find by a search engine. So I began the process of converting each topics page already posted to a sub-index (e.g. "M") and cut-and-pasting those pages' contents to new, stand-alone, topics pages (e.g. "Medieval photography: Nicholas Allen").
Posts: In August, I blogged only 4 new posts (latest uppermost): "Jones, Stephen E."; "Medieval photography: Nicholas Allen"; "The Shroud of Turin blog topics `M'"; "Chronology of the Turin Shroud: Second century"; and "`Editorial and Contents,' Shroud of Turin News".
Comments: In August I was told by an anonymous commenter under my "Medieval photography: Nicholas Allen" post:
"Don't overstretch this topic. It's time to stop writing about Nicolas Allen and his medieval photography theory and to write about something else now ..."I replied (inter alia):
"... in general my response is simple: If you don't like what I write, then don't read it! As I have stated before ... I don't write my blog to court popularity. I write what I believe is the truth about the Shroud and should be written ... The bottom line is that whether my blog has 5 views a day (which it once had) or the current ~500 views a day, I will continue to write the same as I always have: without fear or favour."
My radiocarbon dating hacker theory: As can be seen above, I didn't blog about my hacker theory in August. But I did receive a draft of part 3 of Joe Marino's, "The Politics of Radiocarbon Dating" (see part 1 and part 2), which should be in Shroud.com's September update. In it there will be a paragraph about my "hypothesis that the labs results were the result of a computer hacking" and a link to the start of my current hacker series, "The 1260-1390 radiocarbon date of the Turin Shroud was the result of a computer hacking."
Nicholas Allen's `medieval photography' theory: On 31 August I 
received Allen's 1998 book "The Turin Shroud and the Crystal Lens: Testament to a Lost Technology" [Right] in the mail, so I have only dipped into it, focusing on Allen's claimed or implied use of only medieval materials and methods in the making of the 180 mm (~7 inch), optical quality quartz crystal lens, which Allen claimed he used to form his `shroud' image.
Last night (1 September) I found in Allen's book, "The Turin Shroud and the Crystal Lens," where he indirectly admitted that he had used "synthetic quartz" (pp. 94, 96-97, 207, 240, etc.), that is "fused quartz," made from quartz sand heated to ~2,000°C in a modern furnace, not rock crystal, the latter being what was only available in the Middle Ages to fashion a quartz lens. Therefore Allen's "medieval photography" theory fails through lack of experimental support. And, as we shall see, unless Allen can explain (he has read my blog in the past, even emailing me about something I wrote about his theory) where he has clearly stated and shown that the materials and methods he used were entirely medieval, then I will have no alternative but to assume that Allen has indeed in this committed scientific fraud (although presumably due self-deception).
I will document this in a separate post after I have read Allen's book more thoroughly. If Allen emails me, he should be aware of my stated policy that:
"Private messages I receive on Shroud of Turin related topics, I reserve the right to respond publicly via this blog, quoting the message or email, minus the senders' personal identifying information, unless that is self-evident."I will allow Allen to fully explain, albeit briefly, on my blog, even in an unedited guest post, his side of his claim to have used a:
"quartz (optical quality, rock-crystal) bi-convex lens ... 180 mm [in diameter]"[2]when Allen's book says (albeit indirectly-which itself is less than honest) that the 180 mm lens he used to replicate the Shroud was made of non-medieval "synthetic quartz" and hence not crystal!
Pageviews: At midnight on 31 August, Google Analytics [below (enlarge)]
gave this blog's "Pageviews all time history" as 584,212 and "Pageviews last month" as 14,970. It also gave the most viewed posts for the month as: "`Ian Wilson's Turin Shroud theories are the worst kind of junk history'," Apr 17, 2010 - 578; "Medieval photography: Nicholas Allen," Aug 7, 2016 - 108; "8; "Re: Shroud blood ... types as AB ... aged blood always types as AB, so the significance of this ... is unclear," Mar 18, 2011 - 90; "The Shroud of Turin blog topics `M'," Aug 7, 2016 - 81; and "The Shroud of Turin: 3.6. The man on the Shroud and Jesus were crucified," Dec 2, 2013 - 65. As can be seen in the graph above, the huge jump in the number of pageviews from about 21st July, plateaued out on about 2nd August. The map under "Audience" still shows most of my readers are in the Russian Federation, which is particularly gratifying to me that I can provide information about the Shroud to people who might otherwise have difficulty finding that information.
Notes:
1. This post is copyright. Permission is granted to extract or quote from any part of it (but not the whole post), provided the extract or quote includes a reference citing my name, its subject heading, its date, and a hyperlink back to it. [return]
2. Allen, N.P.L., 1995, "Verification of the Nature and Causes of the Photonegative Images on the Shroud of Lirey-Chambery-Turin," De Arte 51, Pretoria, UNISA, pp.21-35. [return]
Posted 1 September 2016. Updated 3 May 2024.
I wonder that there is a correlation between the fact that most of your readers come from the Russian Federation and your hacking theory.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous
ReplyDelete>I wonder that there is a correlation between the fact that most of your readers come from the Russian Federation and your hacking theory.
There may be, but as far as I am aware, Google Analytics does not provide information about where readers of individual posts come from.
Also my hacking theory posts rarely (if ever) feature in Google Analytics' most pageviews for a month.
Superficially one might think that my July 30 post, "The 1260-1390 radiocarbon date of the Turin Shroud was the result of a computer hacking #9," which was about the former Soviet Union's alleged role in the hacking, may have been responsible for the 21st August sudden jump in pageviews. But as the Google Analytics reports in my "Editorial and Contents" posts for July and August show, that post was not listed in the most pageviews for those months.
Also, my May 2016 "Editorial and Contents" post was when I first noticed the map of Russia representing the most readers, but there was no hacker theory post in that month. There seems to have been a gradual increase in Russian readers over time and they are not reading any particular posts.
Stephen E. Jones
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MY POLICIES. Comments are moderated. Those I consider off-topic, offensive or sub-standard will not appear. Except that comments under my latest post can be on any Shroud-related topic. I normally allow only one comment per individual under each one of my posts.