Reaction to my new and absurdly simple "stick 'n' stain" model for the Turin Shroud? So far, one of stunned silence or ill-concealed contempt.

My posting from this morning has disappeared entirely. All that remains is the title and the tags.  This has never happened before in over 6 years of using Google's Blogger Blogspot hosting.

I shall try to reconstruct as best I can, though it may take some time ( days rather than hours).

The next posting (and all future ones) will be copied to file before posting.  If  they disappear , they will be replaced immediately.

(Have been doing some tests - seems I've been hacked. Can't say as I'm surprised). 

Halleluja: have been able to retrieve the first part of my posting by accessing Google cache:

Here it is, with some patching up here and there. See change to original plan (at end). Nuff said.

Imprints of this blogger's hand obtained using the new two-stage procedure. First stage: the hand was painted with white flour paste  and then imprinted onto linen. Second stage: chemical development of the negative flour imprint with nitric acid.

It's hardly surprising, is it, that a model for the Turin Shroud that starts with  "Mix some plain flour and water 700 years ago" fails to set the world of sindonology on fire?

But that's in essence what was proposed some 6 weeks ago, i.e. that the TS image began life as a flour imprint on linen, to which suggestion the response from some could be described as looks of blank incomprehension(well, the internet equivalent thereof) and expressions of derision and contempt from others.

I'm sorry that the model uses so plebeian a commodity as plain flour as imprinting medium. Had I given it more thought, it could so easily have been something more upmarket. Saffron? From Saffron Walden, Essex,  hopefully to give a UK connection with medieval France, and attract the attention of the Times and the Guardian?  Saffron would certainly give an instant yellow imprint, eliminating the need for that hazardous second-stage development with nitric acid.  But would the sceptics, whether pro- or anti-authenticty,  buy into that story: "TS image is simply a saffron imprint"? I doubt it somehow. Shame. I could have stayed in the cosy well-appointed kitchen laboratory, avoiding the cold confines of my garage had safe old saffron been the answer.

I must also apologize for describing it as the "stick 'n' stain" model in my last posting. How utterly common can you get?

But I have this difficulty you see. It's to do with that serendipity thingy. You know, you start off with a brilliant idea to try this or try that, and along comes something totally unexpected and surprising that one would never have predicted in a million years.

Well, that's exactly how it happened. This blogger/retired science bod was casting around for something organic that might give a yellow-brown colour with nitric acid in pursuance of his "simulated sweat imprint" model of the Turin Shroud, and decided to use flour. Why flour? Maybe it's because he used to be Head of Nutrition and Food Safety at the Flour Milling and Baking Research Association, as it was then called when based at Chorleywood. Or maybe it's because he had been tinkering with ideas to do with Maillard browning reactions a year or so ago, and had done some halfhearted experiments with flour attracting pitiful glances from his wife. Irrespective, flour was chosen some 6 weeks ago, mixed with hot or cold water to make a paste or glue that he then painted onto various parts of his anatomy as imprinting medium. Something totally unexpected was seen, and duly reported here as follows (italics) on 21st April. Here are my words, under the first of many  photographs showing linen clinging to anatomy, thanks to the incredible adhesive properties of flour paste (which incidentally were used to stick family photos into a home-made album I made some 60 years ago). From April 21st:

Some details re the imprinting technology thus far (as promised)

I used my right hand to paint the left one with a thick paste made the previous day using white flour and hot water (it set to a gel overnight in the fridge, which reverted to a paste on stirring). Linen was placed on top, as shown, and then pressed down firmly to produce an imprint on the underside of the linen. Note the considerable detail in the imprint, even at this early stage.

 Fast forward to the present:

It took a little while for the significance of that photograph to sink in, namely that the use of an ADHESIVE paste as imprinting medium virtually guaranteed that one would get an unbeatable Stage 1  imprint, provided the linen peeled away cleanly, taking most of the flour with it, and provided that imprint could then be successfully developed chemically with something that reacts quickly with one or more components of the flour without too much discoloration of the linen.

Well, the crucial peel-off step worked better than one dared to hope. Sometimes one would hardly know that one's hand had been painted with flour, given the extent to which flour transferred cleanly to linen. And we hit the jackpot first time with that choice of nitric acid as Stage 2 developer giving, among other things,  a rapid xanthoproteic reaction with the gluten of the flour. End result:  a prominent yellow colour that then went a more (TS-like?) yellowish-brown when the excess of acid was neutralized with mild alkali (sodium bicarbonate).

Just yesterday I discovered that nitric acid could be replaced with the less hazardous limewater (calcium hydroxide solution, also an alkali) though unlike nitric acid it does not work quickly in the cold, needing some heat to produce (probably) a Maillard reaction between reducing sugars and protein, and, as before, a yellowish-brown imprint.

Enough of the chemistry, for now at any rate. I shall proceed to hit the post button, but be adding more to this posting in the next few days. I shall  be summarizing briefly how I arrived at the decision to raid the kitchen cabinet for that oh-so-boring plain white flour, though a hint has already been given ("simulated sweat imprint").

This also got wiped yesterday:

Yet another attempt to infantilize...  It gets boring after a while.

But see this immediate response from Dan Porter, who assures one there was no attempt to belittle the man or his ideas.

This was the first comment:

rick

June 7, 2015 at 1:48 pm

Reply

 

Colin…hope you’re not offended by the pic Dan posted….I can remember a few months back when you posted pic after pic in response to some comments…..I laughed….hilarious!
However I think the problem you have with this site is that there are too many people here
(with excellent knowledge) that “call you” on some of your theories. Maybe it’s better for you
to go to a site where there are more like minded people, who will give you a pat and the back whether your theory make sense or not. I’m not sure if the shroud is real or not…but I do know that I’ll miss your postings.

My reply (posted here only):

The only 'pat on the back' one expects from some of that site's regulars would be a cow pat (fresh, aka BS ;-)

Nuff said methinks. 


Update: Sunday June 7

 Change of plan: I'm now terminating all posting on the Shroud of Turin, feeling as I do that I've given it my best shot, and that it's now time to move on. However, I'm still available here to respond to questions, criticism etc as best I can  (see quick link to Comments top right).

New directions:

1. Am planning a website on Crete as a tourist destination. The ginormous island gets a somewhat unenthusiastic write-up in my Rough Guide - the only one to hand at present. It  has to be better than described - somewhere, some place  surely- maybe off the beaten track.  So a detailed recce will be made, probably next year, with a view -finally- to penning a travelogue, assuming I can find a publisher. May look in on Heraklion this year, if only to suss out hire car options, and get the capital out the way - it maybe deserving its reputation of being a place one does not linger.

2. Re-activated a Telegraph account yesterday, a previously problematic Chief Moderator who shall nremain nameless having moved on.

Here your host in full demob happy opinionated mode:

(a) in response to a post exposing Vladimir Putin's army of hired trolls, posing as regular commenters on internet sites, English-language included:



SORRY ABOUT THE GAPS THAT FOLLOW. THIS SITE'S SOFTWARE HAS A FLAW, IN THAT IT SLAVISHLY ADOPTS THE FORMATTING (OFTEN HIDDEN) OF ANYTHING THAT ONE INSERTS AS A CUT-AND-PASTE, AND IT'S THEN THE DEVIL'S OWN JOB TO REMOVE ONCE IT'S BEEN INCORPORATED AS A DEFAULT FORMAT, OVERRIDING ONE'S OWN SETTINGS.

ColinB 20 hours ago 

 

What's so worrying is the way that this hard-nosed Russian leader quite shamelessly resorts to all the megaphone propaganda techniques of a former adversary (ours too) from the 1930s. Putin needs to be questioned closely on which direction he and his nation wish to take, now at a crucial crossroads in world affairs, and made aware of the risks of painting himself and his over-respectful (or fearful) citizens into a no-win corner.
He's the one who (unlike his Soviet predecessors) constantly alludes to his possession in concrete bunkers of the ultimate 'deterrent' despite facing no obvious threats, at least that we are aware of (anything-for-a-quiet-life-Obama???). Hopefully sense will prevail.

ColinB 8 hours ago 

 

The more a country expands, the more borders it makes with other countries (Russia presently has 14 of those). The more countries that are annexed, the more "different" the new lot of neighbours. It doesn't take a genius to recognize that it then only takes a paranoid (or paranoia-inducing) leader to claim his country is being "encircled" by an ever-growing number of hostile powers, and is under threat of invasion.
That then is the trouble with being expansionist - it generates its own momentum. Russia already spans11 time zones. Surely that's sufficient. We in the UK manage with just one.

Then there was this one in response to the address given at Cheltenham Science Festival by Prof. Lord Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal:

ColinB 4 hours ago 

 

So, the Universe is an intensely hostile place, unsuitable for organic life in most places, bar a few tiny scattered fragments of star dust. The latter, otherwise known as planets or exoplanets, have to be close enough to their mother star to be warm, but not too warm, and to be able to hang onto a breathable atmosphere (not even 'habitable' Mars is able do that). Each habitable speck is separate from the next by billions of miles of cold vacuum, not counting micrometeorites travelling at thousands of miles per hour, puncturing space craft and space suits. And we're supposed to get excited at the prospect of "colonizing space"?
Meanwhile, back on Mother Earth, hundreds of thousands of desperate migrants flee largely dried-up politically-unstable parts of Africa and the Middle East that once, just a few thousand years ago, were both wet and fertile, but our top scientists prefer to reflect on the challenge of bioforming terraforming Mars, surely a pipe dream for the most part.
Wouldn't it make more sense to scrap all manned space missions, to continue to develop robotry for space exploration, and begin a massive programme for making the deserts bloom? Surely the abundant solar power from cloudless skies is sufficient to power coastal distillation plants and the pumps to send the precious 'sweet' water inland for irrigation. Where's there's a will... Or is it a certain religion that stands in the way of effecting that kind of material progress, of making lives better for ordinary citizens in otherwise 'God-forsaken' regions? Why isn't oil income being used to promote fertility and regrowth of forests and grassland etc. with job opportunities, instead of being squandered to create prestige replicas of Shanghai or New York?
It's a mad, mad world...

Subsequent comments (from others on the thread, my italics):

Grumpy ColinB • 9 hours ago

 

I read some years ago that for the cost of the ISS, every major solid body in our solar system could have been explored by robotic probes, several deep-space telescopes launched and even a "robot" base set up on Mars. Instead there have been thousands of experiments to confirm the findings of the cosmonauts on Mir, that zero-gravity is deleterious to health and quail chicks can't fly.

inanutshell Grumpy • 9 hours ago

 

You echo my views entirely. We have spent perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars to explore our own back yard. It's a good job Columbus didn't decide to just sail around the Scilly Isles......

Reply:

ColinB inanutshell • an hour ago

 

Not an appropriate analogy methinks. Telescopes at sea could not see over the horizon, so there was no knowing what one would find except by sailing west for weeks or months on end.
It's an entirely different situation where space 'voyages' are concerned. Telescopes trained at the night sky tell you that you're not going to discover hidden exoplanets until you reach the next star/solar system (with or without planets). That's a minimum average distance of some 4.3 light years if setting off from Earth.
Think a minimum of 20 years or so for a return trip if checking out Alpha Centauri for planets, with no guarantee you'll find one, far less that it's habitable. That's assuming a propulsion system that can get you up to half the speed of light, say, at a comfortable acceleration, say 1.0g (reckon a year alone to reach max.velocity). Don't forget that deceleration at the other end also has to be comfortable (likewise 1g).
That's a long journey to make, on the off chance you'll find a New (and welcoming) World out there.

Update: Wed 10 June

This comment has just appeared from David Mo on the shroudstory site. It's not addressed to this blogger, but reiterates the same (dubious) assertion (see my italics) we've seen several times of late, namely that if the TS were a medieval forgery, then we'd have seen the technology used elsewhere:

David Mo

June 10, 2015 at 1:48 am

Reply

Someone should study why de common sense is the worst respected of all senses.
Jos Verhulst had said a very common sense thing (June 8, 2015 at 10:2am) that has gone unnoticed by almost everybody: If the formation of the image of the Shroud were a natural process, we would have a lot of similar images.
So we have two possibilities only:
The image was produced by a process common in the Antiquity or Middle Ages that is not possible in the present days. That is the hypothesis of painting (or similar imprinting) with time degradation added.
Or it is a miracle.
Both processes are difficult if not impossible to test. Time and resurrection are variable that we can not reproduce. Perhaps a more accurate testing of the cloth by an independent and interdisciplinary team of experts could find evidences about pigments or similar, but resurrecting a man is out of our possibilities… for the moment.
Only an answer is possible for the moment: we don’t know.
I know that this methodical scepticism is not welcome by those that need confirmatory evidences for their faith or think that science can solve every problem in the universe. May be these are good reasons to refuse to hear the common sense arguments of the prudent man.

Sorry, David Mo and others, but you are missing the point entirely. If someone had set out to fabricate what we now call the Turin Shroud with a view to claiming it was the actual linen that had been used to convey Jesus from cross to tomb, then it would have totally defeated the object of the exercise if the technology had then become sufficiently common knowledge to be duplicated elsewhere. There could only be ONE surviving Joseph of Arimathea linen. It was the inescapable logic, carried through single-mindedly to its highly successful conclusion. The project needed to be done in complete secrecy, behind closed doors and shuttered windows. Any prototype/practice versions HAD TO BE collected up for immediate shredding and/or burning.
It's interesting, and perhaps significant, that in the few years that preceded the first recorded appearance of the TS at the tiny and remote village of Lirey, the Lord of that manor, Geoffroi de Charny was a close confidante of the King ("John the Good"). What's more, that highly regarded knight had been instrumental in getting the king to create the Order of the Star which, while short-lived (due to death of Geoffroi at Poiteirs and the King's capture by the English) has been suggested by Ian Wilson to have been an attempt to recreate some semblance of the purged Knights Templar. Might it be possible that the TS was intended to play a ceremonial role for the new order, reminiscent of that mysterious image on cloth of a bearded man one reads about that was used by Templars in initiation rituals? * Might the fabrication of a talismanic TS have been commissioned by the highest men in the land, up to and including King John himself? If so, then money would have been no object, sufficient not only to secure the services of the most skilled craftsmen, possibly from a monastic order, but to buy their silence too (or threaten with dire consequences in the event of the secret ever being allowed to slip out).* See this passage from John Long:"Geoffrey de Charny of Lirey would have somehow acquired the Shroud before 1355, just at the time new King John II, “the Good” because of his pious and upstanding character, was attempting to establish a new Templar-like order. Called the Order of the Star it was devoted to the same chivalric idealism so characteristic of the Templars, and so evident in Geoffrey’s personality.  Geoffrey was among 500 knights from across France called to join. Wilson wonders “was Geoffrey trying to revive the Templars under a different name?” with plans to use the Templar Shroud as an object of veneration to rally select knights of similar attitudes (Wilson 1979: 198). But the new Order was effectively destroyed at the September 19, 1356 Battle of Poitiers with the English capture of John and death of many knights of the Order, including Geoffrey. This also signaled the end of 1300 years of quasi-secret Shroud possession as the cloth’s new decision makers began to share it with the wider Christian public. So, in Wilson’s view, the de Charny secret was that the Shroud had been the “idol” of a disgraced Christian sect"  Update 16:00: 

Yannick Clément commented on Guest Posting by Yannick Clément.

in response to Sampath Fernando:

I have never heard a printing an image on a linen cloth due to following occasions: 1.By a Dead body before or after 3 days (or 72 hours) 2. By a living body before or after 3 days 3. By a traumatised dead body before or after 3 days 4. By a traumatised living body […]

Along with these conditions, I think it would be crucial to not forget the high probability of the presence of a thin and uneven layer of carbohydrate impurities on the cloth’s surface… To me, that kind of chromophore is the most probable that we got in the light of all the most solid data coming from the study done by STURP and the follow-up studies done by Adler and Rogers. I say the most probable because this could rationally explain the toughest characteristic of the image, which is its extreme superficiality, along with its more or less even density everywhere, no matter if we talks about the dorsal or the frontal part of the image.

  Kindly change the record Yannick. You've been repeating that mantra over and over again for the the entire 3.5 years I've been accessing the shroudstory site on which the above has yet again reappeared. You have become the Ancient Mariner of shroudology, with the same old albatross slung across same much-too-young neck. Your recurring mantra is not just blatantly and outrageously unscientific. It is the very antithesis of science. Summarized: "If you think my preferred narrative, with all its fantasizing and qualifying assumptions, with its dearth of supporting fact is wrong,  then the onus is on you dear friend to prove that.  Until you do so, I shall free and indeed obligated to go on spreading my message." Nope, there's no onus whatsoever on a spectator scientist to disprove anyone else's hypothesis, unless one feels it has something going for it, making it worthy of attention.  The hypothesis proposed, which is a secondhand one needless to say, with its original proponent, the explosives-safety specialist Mr.Raymond N.Rogers sadly no longer with us, requires so many improbable events to occur within the same narrow time frame to produce a unique outcome, never seen before nor after, as to be what is politely known as "blue sky thinking". Yes, there's a role for blue-sky thinking in science, but only as a basis for immediate framing and testing of TESTABLE hypotheses. Instead we see the clogging up the literature year-after-year, decade-after-decade, due to failure to recognize that the complex multistage hypothesis could fail to be bear fruit through just one of any number of factors failing to perform as required. That makes the hypothesis unscientific, not necessarily because it's wrong, though it almost certainly is, but because it's impossible to design experiments that have any realistic probability of producing a useful outcome. (To get a yellow coloration in his model system, Rogers et al not only used ammonia as the gaseous amine, which is highly volatile compared with most putrefaction amines, but quietly employed a temperature of 66 degrees C (!) way, way above any temperature realized by natural putrefaction, especially of a recently-deceased body).What we see above is the unacceptable face of shroudology - the obsessive loop-re-playing of a pseudo-scientific narrative as though it were real science. It's not. It's trivia - total time-wasting, mind-numbing, spirit-sapping trivia, fit only for the wastepaper bin of history, or its electronic equivalent (optimistically called the Recycle Bin on my laptop, but only because it serves to free up some minuscule storage space on a hard drive). Update: Thursday 11 June.Have just posted this to this morning's DT editorial ("The BBC Must Take Its Responsibility Seriously").

ColinB • 6 minutes ago

 

Am pleased to see that the DT has updated its polling chart to include more recent data (this very month, June 2015 in fact, if one hovers one's pointer over the right hand side). So that's (apparently) now 55% for staying in, 45% for getting out, a big change since the last polling date, October 2014. (But what's happened to "undecideds"?) But note the two lines are now converging. If present trends were to continue the present gap could close completely by the time that long-overdue referendum finally arrives, especially if 2017.

What a terrible indictment of the BBC, financed by licence payers across the entire political spectrum, to have MPs asking for 24/7 vigilance over its referendum coverage. The trouble of course with the BBC-ish style of slanted news and comment is the manner in which liberal-leftish viewpoints are a default position that rarely if ever recognizes the existence of an alternative, and a robust one at that.

That's the trouble, one suspects - that the BBC considers the right-of-centre view to come over too strong, that if it admits a little, then it's a slippery slope to ultra-right wing nastiness. Yet somehow it manages to prevent its own position becoming hijacked or over-polarized by the hard left. How odd, nay, inexcusable, that it should operate this double standard not just year after year, but decade after decade, and to be allowed to get away with its inbred institutionalized liberal/left bias. One suspects it to do with its keep-below-the-radar modus operandi like deciding who NOT to interview, or when they do, to confront that individual with a over-inquisitorial gad fly interviewer, with an imaginary 10 foot disinfected barge pole clearly in evidence.

So what's the answer to this long-standing mismatch between the BBC's narrowband politics, and those of the wider broadband it is supposed to serve?

Methinks it's time to do to, or rather, for, the BBC what Maggie Thatcher did to the old GLC. Go back to the drawing board. Tear up the original plan, now hopelessly outdated. Reconstitute it from scratch. It won't necessarily produce instant results (Ken Livingstone still managed to wheedle his way back into the revamped GLA) but oh boy, does it send a message that no institution in our country can continue to operate as if above public or parliamentary scrutiny.

This is surely the right moment to uninvent/reinvent the BBC, now, before the referendum! Seize the moment David Cameron.

Oops. I almost forgot. Our PM is no doubt more than happy to have the BBC singing from his own hymn sheet about how everything, well, almost everything in the EU garden is lovely, apart from a few unsightly weeds that can easily be negotiated away. In the meantime the BBC's interviewers and cameras continue to avert their gaze from the rampant nettles and bindweed that in a few years time threaten to choke everything in sight.