Carol is at a First Watch breakfast; you
finished breakfast and the paper.
0902
hours. When the grass dries it’s time to mow the yard once again.
After
noon. You have the north yard front and back to do, otherwise the bulk is cut
and some will need raked. You talked to Tim who has been ill with a torn retina
but is recovering well. Today he can drive and tomorrow he can begin walking
(exercising). In the next few weeks he will mow so you won’t have to think
about it. – Amorella
1247
hours. I mowed for about an hour and a half so far. I did have to take breaks because
of the sun intensity. About a third of what is left to mow is in shade which
will make it easier; the other part mowed is in the sun.
Late
afternoon, Carol is napping on the living room couch after running errands this
afternoon. You mowed the east half of the north lawn and Carol mowed the flat
west half. She finished about half an hour ago and a downpour began fifteen
minutes or so later. You also called Al S. the Internet salesman and King’s
Ford and found you could get a Hybrid Fusion Titanium model with Driver’s
Assist and the other goodies for about $32,500 and that presently he had 16 in
and more are coming in next week. That seems like a pretty good deal to you
because that does not include the trade in which you think will be worth
$5,000. Check and see what a fair price for a 2005 Honda Accord Ex with 72,000
miles is worth for trade in online. – Amorella
1801
hours. Carol and I talked about it a bit at lunch (Panera) and I mentioned I
called Ford at the nearby King’s Auto Mall. She didn’t say anything negative
about looking. So perhaps we will next week. Marsha called and we are going to
meet her and David at the authentic Amish/Mennonite ‘Der Dutchman’ on Monday.
The plan now is to go up Sunday and stay at Kim and Paul’s overnight. From
their house it is less than an hour to Der Dutchman Restaurant at I-71 and State
Route 97 near Bellville. Kelly’s Blue Book says $6,810 low to $7,865 high for the Accord. I marked it
Average, not Good or Excellent. If we were to get $7,000 for it that would make
it $ 25,500 or thereabouts, plus tax, of course. Still, that would be less than
the 2005 cost originally or thereabout – sounds worth looking into in any case. According to Kelly’s Blue
Book a fair purchase price for the Hybrid Fusion Titanium in our area is
$33,600 to $34,789 with an average of $34,175.
You never know, boy. Post. - Amorella
** **
You
both had a late snack supper of ham, cheese, mustard and pickles on half a
piece of flat bread and a snack or two. You watched NBC News and another
“Modern Crimes”. Carol just went upstairs and you are following shortly.
Tomorrow you want to be at Cathy and Tod’s around eleven for lunch in nearby
Uptown Westerville. They are choosing the place you have not eaten before but
they have. Afterwards you are stopping to see Aunt Patsy but then are heading
home before the Friday afternoon downtown rush. You are feeling good so far
about leaning towards the Ford Fusion Hybrid Titanium for your next car so you
can better spread the mileage between both cars, particularly on trips to Kim
and Paul’s. Time to give the Avalon some rest time on longer journeys. The car
has twelve less horsepower but is suppose to get up to forty-four miles per
gallon in the city. You’ll take forty and be happy with it. At least this is
how you see it at the moment. Post. – Amorella
Checking
BBC before bed I discovered this article, one of many on the Shroud of Turin. I
remember in the late sixties or early seventies reading that the shroud may
hold the blood of the crucified man. This was a very exciting thought, because
if it were the blood of Jesus (and now they know the blood type is A/B) then
possibly in the future a clone could be created from the blood and in a sense
the man will have returned at least in part. I saw great humor and irony in
these thoughts and still do. It certainly got me thinking and it still does –
that’s some forty-five years ago. I feel rightly or wrongly that little whiffs
of such humor and irony occur all the time whether we see them or not. This is
the stage life exists on – humor and irony – at least in these books and blog
it does.
Humor and irony are at the very roots of
these books and blog boy. And, you don’t mind at all if the joke is on you. Add
the BBC Magazine article then post. – Amorella
2259
hours. I don’t mind at all if the joke is on me, or the species as a whole.
** **
Magazine
How did the
Turin Shroud get its image?
On Sunday, Pope Francis will "venerate" the famous
Shroud of Turin, which is thought by some to be the burial wrapping of Jesus
Christ - and by others to be a medieval fake. Whatever it is, it's a mystery
how the cloth came to bear the image of a man. Science writer Philip Ball
discusses the theories.
In a carefully worded announcement, the Archbishop of Turin says
that the Pope "confirms the devotion to the shroud that millions of
pilgrims recognise as a sign of the mystery of the passion and death of the
Lord".
You'll notice that this says nothing about its authenticity. The
Catholic Church takes no official position on that, stating only that it is a
matter for scientific investigation. Ever since radiocarbon dating in 1989
proclaimed the 14ft by 4ft piece of linen to be roughly 700 years old, the
Church has avoided claiming that it is anything more than an "icon"
of Christian devotion.
But regardless of the continuing arguments about its age
(summarised in the box at the bottom of this page) the Shroud of Turin is a
deeply puzzling object. Studies in 1978 by an international team of experts -
the Shroud of Turin Research Project (Sturp) - delivered no clear explanation
of how the cloth came to bear the faint imprint of a bearded man apparently
bearing the wounds of crucifixion.
There's no shortage of hypotheses. Some suggest that the image
came about through natural processes; some impute considerable ingenuity to
medieval forgers of relics; others invoke wondrous physical processes
associated with the Resurrection. But do any have any merit?
1. It's a painting
If this were true, it should be possible to identify the
pigments used by chemical analysis, just as conservators can do for the
paintings of Old Masters. But the Sturp team found no evidence of any pigments
or dyes on the cloth in sufficient amounts to explain the image. Nor are there
any signs of it being rendered in brush strokes. In fact the image on the linen
is barely visible to the naked eye, and wasn't identified at all until 1898,
when it became apparent in the negative image of a photograph taken by Secondo
Pia, an amateur Italian photographer. The faint coloration of the flax fibres
isn't caused by any darker substance being laid on top or infused into them -
it's the very material of the fibres themselves that has darkened. And in
contrast to most dyeing or painting methods, the colouring cannot be dissolved,
bleached or altered by most standard chemical agents. The Sturp group asserted
that the image is the real form of a "scourged, crucified man… not the
product of an artist". There are genuine bloodstains on the cloth, and we
even know the blood group (AB, if you're interested). There are traces of human
DNA too, although it is badly degraded.
That didn't
prevent the American independent chemical and microscopy consultant, Walter
McCrone, who collaborated with the Sturp team, from asserting that the red
stains attributed to blood were in fact very tiny particles of the red pigment
iron oxide, or red ochre. Like just about every other aspect of the shroud,
McCrone's evidence is disputed; few now credit it. Another idea is that the
image is a kind of rubbing made from a bas-relief statue, or perhaps imprinted
by singeing the fabric while it lay on top of such a bas-relief - but the
physical and chemical features of the image don't support this.
2. It was made by a natural
chemical process
If the coloured imprint comes from the darkening of the
cellulose fibres of the cloth, what might have caused it? One of the doyens of
scientific testing of the shroud, Raymond Rogers of the Los Alamos National
Laboratory in New Mexico, argued in 2002 that a simple chemical transformation
could do the job. He suggested that even very moderate heat - perhaps 40C
(104F) or so, a temperature that post-mortem physicians told him a dead body
could briefly attain if the person died from hyperthermia or dehydration -
could be enough to discolour the sugary carbohydrate compounds that might be
found on the surface of cotton fibres. It doesn't take a miracle, Rogers
insisted. This is a reassuringly mundane idea, but there is little evidence for
it in this particular circumstance - it's not as if it happens all the time on
funeral shrouds.
Another idea is that the discoloration of the fibres was caused
by a chemical reaction with some substance that emanated from the body. The
French biologist, Paul Vignon, proposed in the early 1900s that this substance
might have been ammonia, produced by the breakdown of urea in sweat. That won't
work, though: the image would be too blurry. In 1982, biophysicist John DeSalvo
suggested instead that the substance could be lactic acid from sweat. This
compound is one of those responsible for so-called Volckringer images of plant
leaves, left for years between the pages of a book: substances are exuded from
the leaf and react with paper fibres to produce a dark, negative image.
3. It's a photograph
Secondo Pia's photograph showed that the image on the cloth is a
negative: dark where it should be bright. This deepens the mystery, and Pia
himself casually suggested that the shroud could have been made by some
primitive kind of photography. That idea has been inventively pursued by South
African art historian Nicholas Allen, who argues that it could in principle
have been achieved using materials and knowledge available to medieval scholars
many centuries before genuine photography was invented. The key to the idea is
the light-sensitive compound silver nitrate, the stuff that darkened the
emulsion of the first true photographic plates in the 19th Century, as light
transformed the silver salt into tiny black particles of silver metal.
This substance
does seem to have been known in the Middle Ages, Allen says: it was described
in the writings of the 8th Century Arabic alchemist, Jabir ibn Hayyan, and also
by the German Dominican Albertus Magnus in the 13th Century. It could have been
coated on to the cloth in a darkened chamber and exposed to sunlight through a
lens - made of quartz not glass, since the silver is in fact darkened by
ultraviolet light, which glass absorbs but quartz does not. Allen has made
replicas of a shroud this way using model figurines. But how the image stays on
the cloth when the silver is removed, and how mediaeval forgers gathered all
this sophisticated knowledge about optics and chemistry without there being any
trace in surviving documents poses problems for the idea. So do various issues
about the exact shape and contrast of an image made this way. For most Turin
Shroud theorists, Allen's idea is a triumph of ingenuity over plausibility.
4. It was made by some kind
of energy release
According to an international team of scientists and other interested
folk called the Yahoo Shroud Science Group, hypotheses about the genesis of the
shroud "involving the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth cannot be
rejected". Among them, the group members write, "are hypotheses
correlated to an energy source coming from the enveloped or wrapped Man, [and]
others correlated to surface electrostatic discharges caused by an electric
field". Since these hypotheses appear to invoke processes unknown to
science, which presumably occur during a return from the dead, it's technically
true that science can't disprove them - nor really say anything about them at
all.
Some, however, are not deterred by that. Italian chemist Giulio
Fanti of the University of Padua has proposed that the image might have been
burnt into the upper layers of the cloth by a burst of "radiant
energy" - bright light, ultraviolet light, X-rays or streams of
fundamental particles - emanating from the body itself. Fanti cites the account
of Christ's Transfiguration, witnessed by Peter, John and James and recounted
in Luke 9:29: "As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and
his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning." This is, to put it
mildly, rather circumstantial evidence. But Fanti suggests we might at least
test whether artificial sources of such radiation can produce a similar result
on linen.
According
Raymond Rogers, all kinds of pseudoscientific theories have been put forward
that invoke some mysterious radiation, which not only made the image itself but
distorted the radiocarbon dating. In general they start from the notion that
the shroud must be genuine and work backwards from that goal, he said. Little
has changed in the decade and more since Rogers made this complaint. But still
it has to be said that the piece of cloth Pope Francis will venerate is
genuinely and stubbornly perplexing.
How old is the Shroud of
Turin?
In 1989 it looked for a moment as though the link between the
Turin Shroud and the burial of Christ was finally broken. Three independent
teams of scientists had been given scraps of the linen, which they analysed
using radiocarbon dating - a technique that uses the decay of a natural,
radioactive form of carbon to figure out how long ago a once-living sample
ceased to be alive (and thus in this case when the cloth was made from plant
fibres). The verdict: the shroud dates from between about 1260 and 1390. It was
a medieval item.
But almost at once, objections were raised. Some argued that the
samples tested had come from later additions to the original cloth. Others said
that the radiocarbon "clock" had been reset by a fire in the 16th
Century that damaged parts of the shroud, or that the findings were distorted
by the more recent growth of bacterial or fungal "biofilms" on the
threads. The authors of the 1989 paper have discounted those possibilities, but
the controversy won't die down. In 2013 Giulio Fanti described dating studies
on the shroud using a non-standard method involving spectroscopy (absorption of
light of different colours), which he says place the age instead between 300 BC
and 400 AD: perfect for true believers.
Selected and edited from -- http://www.bbcDOTcom/news/magazine-33164668
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