"Editorial and Contents," Shroud of Turin News, October 2018

Shroud of Turin News - October 2018
© Stephen E. Jones[1]

[Previous: September 2018, part #1] [Next: November 2018, part #1]

This is the October 2018 issue of my Shroud of Turin News. I have listed below linked news article(s) about the Shroud in October as a service to readers, without necessarily endorsing any of them.

Contents:
• "New statue of the man from the Shroud of Turin unveiled," Herald Malaysian Online, October 19, 2018

Editorial
Rex Morgan's Shroud News: My scanning and word-processing of the 118 issues of Rex Morgan's Shroud News, provided by Ian Wilson, and emailing them to Barrie Schwortz, for him to convert to PDFs and add to his online Shroud News archive, continued in October up to issue #113, October 1998 [Right (enlarge).], i.e ~96% completed. Issues in the archive are up to #110, October 1998.

Media release: In October I completed a simplified version of my media release, outlining my hacker theory, which I intended to email to news outlets in anticipation of an upsurge of media interest in the Shroud's radiocarbon dating as the 30th anniversary drew near of the announcement on 13 October 1988 [see 23Jul15 & 30Oct18] that the Shroud's radiocarbon date was "1260-1390". It transpired that there was no media interest in that anniversary and I missed that deadline anyway. As stated in a note above my 28 October simplified version:

"I have today (3 November) made a start converting a copy of this web page to a Word document. I will try to make progress with that every day, so that I can email it to news media outlets that have published favourable (or at least not unfavourable) news article on the Shroud, by Monday, 12 November."

Posts: In October I blogged 5 new posts (latest uppermost): "13 October 1988: On this day 30 years ago in the radiocarbon dating of the Turin Shroud," - 30th; "Media release: Were the Turin Shroud radiocarbon dating laboratories duped by a computer hacker?," - 28th; "Date index 2016: The Shroud of Turin blog," - 26th; "Open letter to Professor Christopher Ramsey," - 4th; and "Editorial and Contents," Shroud of Turin News, September 2018," - 2nd .

Updates There were no significant updates in the background of past post(s) in October.

In November I continued to update in the background the simplified version of my Media Release as I prepare off-line a Word version to be sent to news outlets by 12 November.

And on 6 November I completed my "Open letter to Professor Christopher Ramsey," and airmailed it to him. I then sent him an email also on 6 November as follows:

Professor Christopher Ramsey
Director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit,
1 South Parks Road,
OXFORD, OX1 3TG
United Kingdom

6 November 2018

Professor Ramsey,

Please see my open letter to you on my The Shroud of Turin blog: "Open letter to Professor Christopher Ramsey".

I have today, 6 November 2018, airmailed to you a printed copy of this post.

If you wish to reply, you may do so in a comment under my post, or by return email to me. If the latter, I will post it to my blog.

Regards,

Stephen E. Jones
The Shroud of Turin blog

Comments: In date order received (earliest first). I deleted two comments in October which were both sub-standard and one of them was also offensive. The offensive and substandard one criticised my posting by installments. I realise that is not ideal, and probably most readers don't like it (as I don't), but in my personal circumstance, being the full-time carer of my wife who is a near-quadriplegic with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) [see 04Feb17, 08May18 & 03Jun18], I just don't have long stretches of time to write a long post from beginning to end in one session. I could add the installments off-line and publish the posts once when they are completed, but that would mean that sometimes I would not post anything for days or even weeks. From what I have read elsewhere, blogs that don't have posts appearing regularly, tend to not be visited by readers. So it's either I post in installments, or not at all! Having said that, it is my policy to always delete as substandard comments that tell me what I should, or should not, post. My response to all such commenters is, "If you don't like what I post, or how I post, then don't read my blog! [see 01Jan18 & 02Mar18].

I published a comment from Antero de Frias Moreira of the Centro Português de Sindonologia, under my "Open letter to Professor Christopher Ramsey" post. He agreed that the c. 1070 depiction by John Skylitzes (c.1040s–c.1101) [Left [2].] of Byzantine general John Curcuas (fl. 915–946), delivering the Mandylion/Image of Edessa portrait, behind which is the Shroud Shroud "four-doubled", to Byzantine Emperor Romanos I Lekapenos (r. 920–944), "is one more piece of evidence that the Mandylion and the Shroud are nothing but the same relic ... So, ancient art provides us pieces of evidence against 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud"!

I published an anonymous comment under my post, "Shroud of Turin News - November 2015, which asked, "... if there is copyright on the Shroud photographs please, as I would like to use some for a project I'm working on." My response (as a non-lawyer) included: "My understanding is that as long as: 1) it is only a small part of the original work; 2) you cite the source; 3) you are not charging money for your work the photograph will be in; and 4) it is in the public interest; it is exempt from copyright by being `fair use.' Also some Shroud photos are very old and copyright lapses 70 years after the author's death (although this varies). My blog photos are usually a reduced size from the original, so they aren't an exact copy. If anything they are an advertisement for the original! I also understand that if a photograph has been on the Internet for a long time and the copyright owner has not objected, it becomes public domain. I don't usually (if ever) use photographs from professional clip art sites like Getty Images. There also was a USA court case (which I can't remember right now) where the judge held that the complainant had to prove that he/she/it had suffered real harm, and it was not `fair use'."

Finally, I deleted a comment as offensive that actually made a good point in that I had originally concluded my "Open letter to Professor Christopher Ramsey" with words to the effect (I don't have a copy of what I wrote) that if Prof. Ramsey took no action, it would be a form of "scientific fraud." The commenter made the good point that that would be a "lack of diplomacy" but I took offense at the way he/she worded it. Nevertheless on reflection, I deleted that final paragraph, even though I regarded it as true, because I didn't want to give Prof. Ramsey an excuse to ignore my open letter to him. For that same reason I did not mention my hacker theory in my open letter.

My radiocarbon dating hacker theory As seen above, I blogged two posts on my hacker theory in October: "13 October 1988: On this day 30 years ago in the radiocarbon dating of the Turin Shroud," and "Media release: Were the Turin Shroud radiocarbon dating laboratories duped by a computer hacker?"

My book: I continued making progress in October, writing a dot-point outline of my book, "Shroud of Turin: The Burial Sheet of Jesus!"

[Right (enlarge): The planned cover of my book.]

on my smartphone using Gmail (see 09May17 and 06Jul17). It became too large, so in October I began breaking it into chapters.

Pageviews: At midnight on 31 October 2018, Google Analytics [Below (enlarge)] gave this blog's "Pageviews all time history" as 972,213. This compares with 813,706 (up 158,507 or 19.5%) from the same time in October 2017. It also gave the most viewed posts for the month (highest uppermost) as: "Shroud News - November 2007," Dec 1, 2007 - 239; Re: Shroud blood ... types as AB ... aged blood always types as AB, so the significance of this ... is unclear," Mar 18, 2011 - 104; "Medieval photography: Nicholas Allen," Aug 7, 2016 - 100; "Open letter to Professor Christopher Ramsey," Oct 4, 2018 - 89; and "My critique of Borrini, M. & Garlaschelli, L., 2018, "A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin," Journal of Forensic Sciences, 10 July," Aug 13, 2018 - 89.

Notes:
1. This post is copyright. I grant permission 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 title, its date, and a hyperlink back to this page. [return]
2. "File:Surrender of the Mandylion to the Byzantines.jpg," Wikimedia Commons, 20 December 2012. [return]

Posted: 5 November 2018. Updated: 11 October 2021.