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And how do you know that this is the author's interest? I happen to know that the author would rather that religion not be discussed in the science classroom. But science teachers can not be afraid to face up to it when it arises.

In the case of the shroud, scientists explored the subject and found no good answers.

Teach the Controversy: Not really. The point is that science teachers should not be afraid to face controversy, if and when it occurs. Big mistakes were made dating the shroud. Should we refuse to explore that because this piece of cloth is also a relic? Avoiding controversy is not the solution to avoiding the teaching of controversy.

This Alaska teacher was either dogmatic in his skepticism or fearful or both. That is not science. That is not teaching.

It is a fine, 3-over-1 herringbone, not tabby. Nowhere, so far, has anyone found medieval linen that matches. According the Flury-Lemberg, it resembles fragments found at Masada (40BC to 70 AD). According the Gilbert Raes and F-L, it is quite likely from a pre-medieval Syrian or Egyptian loom.

The yarn consists of long fibers; about 70 to 100 count, S-twist.

This poll has an editorial quality that approval/disapproval polls do not have. It creates a public perception that is probably invalid if for no other reason than it is extraordinarily improper to compare a sitting president with past presidents. This is particularly true when his approval rating is exceptionally poor (or great as they were after 9/11). Respondents are likely to focus more on current news than on history poorly remembered. That is poor polling.

The editorial quality is unfair. It borders on sensationalism given the expected headline.

But that said, what are the consequences? People don’t always read the detail, and thus it is even more unfair. Even so, two details stands out: 1) the number of Republicans who say Bush is the worst president is significant given the choices before them. 2) the contrast to Reagan is should be disturbing for Bush supporters.

The more the public argues about who is the worst president, the more the poll gets attention around the water cooler.

A congressman in a contested race will pay attention; not because he agrees but because he must weigh the consequences of being to closely identified with “the worst president,” which phraseology-wise resonates more with public understand or misunderstanding than does an approval/disapproval rating.

Now, I am personally very displeased with Bush even though I support much of what he has done. I've veered away more and more lately (imigration reform, Dubai, Harriet Meirs). I'm even inclined to say that he is among the top three worst presidents of our era (the others being democrats),

But I don’t think that this poll is honest. Not in the least.

I don’t quibble with purported representation of party affiliation, timing or statistical methods. But I do have in mind that the designers of this poll pretty much expected the results. I wonder if that was not a motivating factor for the design of the poll.

It is one thing to write an editorial explaining why you think that Bush is the worst president (or a poor president). Many have. It is quite another thing to design a poll to wrap-in the American public, to make them unwitting spokespersons rather than present your own arguments. This poll was a cheap shot. It will hurt Bush (for now) but it may help crystallize the evolving confrontation between congress and the White House.

If I gave the impression of being condescending towards you then I apologize. That was not my intent.

I would not be posting here, and expressing my discomfort with Bush, if I did not care about the conservative agenda.

Bush has a chance to reinvigorate his administration in the same way that Reagan did. These poll numbers should be a wake up call to him. But for now, and unless something changes, he is hurting OUR conservative cause. The polls are an indicator of that.

The sampling method used for polling is valid. It is completely invalid to adjust the numbers after the fact. The question about party affiliation is telling and troubling for those who hold to a conservative agenda.

The fact of the matter is that as poll numbers drop, the number of people who say they are Republican is dropping. This doesn’t mean that the number of registered Republicans is dropping. Nor is it a reflection of adherence to a conservative agenda. Party affiliation responses have a mushy component to them and it swings both ways for both parties. The question is always asked at the end of the survey and that is alarming.

This is not a poll of the agenda of the American mindset. This is a poll of the measure of success of the president and his execution of the agenda. Bush is dragging the conservative agenda down. The public perception that things are not going well in Iraq is probably the primary factor in people’s minds. Whether it is going well or is not is immaterial. It doesn’t look good. The president might have better support if he was capable of communicating better about the war. But his speeches are not effective.

Part of what makes him seem ineffective on the war is the general lackluster perception from other issues: Harriet Meirs, his preemptive veto threat on Dubai, his prescription benefits sessions that look like 3AM infomercials, his standoffish attitude towards congress, etc. etc. etc.

The polls are really very accurate reflections of the public view; not of the conservative agenda but of the man charged to lead the country. Even if the polls are wrong (and they are not) he is hurting the conservative agenda.

Conservatives need to ask themselves what is more important, the agenda or Bush? That is why congress is distancing itself from the president. That is why people are suggesting staff changes. That is why more people are telling pollsters they are Democrats. This last point is the most alarming thing about the poll numbers.

I have posted a picture of the Tiberias Image at:

http://www.shroudstory.com/tiberias.htm

Yes, there are definate points of comparison to the shroud image. There are a whole bunch of people looking at that.

As of now I don't have an opinion.

Shroudie

It is a matter of faith. And I do wonder if we'll have ever proof. But it there and therefore we should try to understand it and explain it as best we can.

Shroudie

See:

http://www.shroudstory.com/shadowshroud.htm

One small excerpt:

It is a well known fact that the images on the Shroud of Turin are superficial. On any given thread where there is a brownish colored image, the image is confined to the outermost two or three fibers. Look beneath them, inside the thread, and you will find near-white fibers.

On the Shroud of Turin the tip of the nose is brown. That is so because a superficial color has formed there; and it is not at all deep. Probe with a needle and you will see the white fibers throughout the thread. Chemical analysis tells us that the brown color at the surface is an amorphous caramel-like substance adhering to just a few fibers. On the other hand, the tip of the nose on Wilson's Shadow Shroud is brown because it was not bleached by the sun. We don't need to look beneath the surface of Wilson's image to realize that below the top two or three fibers, the fibers will also be brown; for it is impossible with sunshine to bleach the inside of a thread without bleaching the outside.

Dan

To YOU it is irrelevant. I respect that. To me it is relevant; not as a foundation for my faith but as something I appreciate because of my faith. I think the evidence strongly favors authenticity.

Shroudie

Actually, I'm an Episcopalian. Many of the Shroud researchers such as Barrie Schwortz and Al Adler are Jewish. Gary Habermass, a big proponent of the Shroud is Evangelical and teaches at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Russ Breault, a significant researcher who thinks the Shroud is authentic is Presbyterian and works for the 700 Club. And the list goes on and on: Baptists, Greek Orthodox, Methodists such as Al Whanger - - and by the way a wide spectrum of liberal and conservative thinkers.

Dan

The carbon 14 dating done in 1988 has been proven invalid. See this story at Fox News:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,145784,00.html

Also see my discussion of the carbon 14 dating at http://www.shroudstory.com . I provide links there to other articles and peer-reviewed scientific journals papers.

Dan

I have also released a press release. This is how my release appeared in Forbes this morning:

Faking a Fake Shroud of Turin and Faking Out Television News

NEW YORK, March 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Over the years there have been numerous attempts to create images like those on the Shroud of Turin. Someone suggested that they might have been painted with lemon juice to create a reverse bleaching effect. Others have suggested that the images might have been formed by draping a cloth over a scorching hot statue, by painting them with pigment dust or by photographing a corpse using some unknown medieval photographic process. The latest such attempt to explain the images was recently proposed by Nathan Wilson, a 26-year-old English professor at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson created an image by painting a picture on a pane of glass positioned over a piece of linen that he left in the sun for several days. The resulting image, caused by sun-bleaching away the background while leaving darker color where the painted picture on the glass masked out the sun, is called a shadow shroud. The image Wilson produced is similar in a few ways to the Shroud of Turin images.

ABC World News Tonight reported the story on March 22, 2005. In a segment entitled, "Shrouded in Mystery No More," anchor Peter Jennings stated, "The Shroud of Turin has mystified scientists for years. Now a literature professor from Idaho says he can prove it's a fake."

"I was amazed at the national television coverage," said shroud researcher Dan Porter in a letter to eighty Shroud of Turin researchers. "Neither Peter Jennings nor ABC's Bill Blakemore, who reported the story, seemed aware of any substantive facts about the shroud. It seems as though they did not do any research and did not consult any scientists to see if the shadow shroud made any sense. It does not."

Porter explains his rationale on the Shroud Story website at http://www.shroudstory.com.

Anthropologist William Meacham, a Research Fellow at the Centre of Asian Studies at the University of Hong Kong, added, "I would like to know how this unscientific idea could possibly get such major coverage, when it so clearly and obviously does not fit the known facts about the Shroud image."

The Shroud of Turin is a fourteen-foot-long cloth with front and back images of a man who appears to have been scourged and crucified. The shroud is kept in St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Turin, Italy.

In recent years the Shroud of Turin has been the subject of intense scientific investigation with numerous findings published in secular peer- reviewed scientific journals. Publishing in peer-reviewed journals is the normal way that scientists present their findings. From these findings three prominent facts emerge.

One fact is that that the outermost fibers on the cloth's thread are coated with a fine layer of starch and saccharides that is thinner than most bacteria. The images on the shroud are wholly contained within this layer as a caramel-like, conjugated double-bonds substance, a brown polymeric material that resists bleaching. The images can be removed with adhesive sampling tape. They can also be decolorized with strong reducing agents leaving clear color-free linen. Several scientists have published papers about this in scientific journals such as the Canadian Society of Forensic Science Journal, Analytica Chimica Acta and Melanoidins. The images are not unbleached linen as Wilson suggests. That is scientifically impossible. Photomicrographs available at http://www.shroudstory.com show the image substance.

Another fact is the presence of a faint second face image on the backside of the cloth. Researchers Giulio Fanti and Roberto Maggiolo of the University of Padua in Italy discovered this image using advanced image analysis techniques. Their scientific findings were published in the peer-reviewed scientific Journal of Optics on April 14, 2004. The two images, one on the front and one on the back directly behind the front image, are completely superficial.

There is no color between them. It is not possible, with sunshine, to bleach the insides of threads while leaving the outside surfaces unbleached.

Chemist Raymond Rogers, a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow, showed that the sample used for carbon-14 dating in 1988 was from a discrete newer repair patch that is chemically unlike the cloth of the Shroud of Turin. Moreover, Rogers found definitive chemical evidence that the Shroud of Turin is at least 1300 years old and possibly much older. Rogers published his findings in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Thermochimica Acta on January 21, 2005.

Flat pane glass suitable for the shadow shroud technique did not exist 1300 years ago, or even six hundred years ago.

"These facts alone prove that Wilson's shadow shroud idea is without any merit," said Porter. "I found it interesting that ABC's Blakemore said that no one could explain how medieval artists could make such an image until literature professor Wilson figured out how. I wonder how many times similar words have been used to describe each of the other failed attempts. Frankly, no one knows how the images were formed, but it wasn't by reverse bleaching in the sunshine. That just will not work."

Commenting on Wilson's theory, Barrie Schwortz, who has studied the shroud since 1978, said, "I have pointed out so many times in the past, any attempt to duplicate the Shroud image must match all of the chemical and physical properties of the image. This result does not. In fact, it gives no explanation for the forensically accurate bloodstains found on the Shroud which, according to forensic experts like Dr. Fred Zugibe, are the result of direct contact between a body and a cloth."

Photographs and a list of peer-reviewed journal articles: http://www.shroudstory.com.

Let's consider some of Ray Rogers own words. The last sentence says it all:

The primary effect of all kinds of radiation is to heat the material it hits. This statement includes electromagnetic radiation (visible, ultraviolet, and infrared radiation); ionizing particles such as protons, electrons, and alpha particles; and non-ionizing particles such as neutrons. You can feel the heat when you hold a lump of plutonium, a flask of tritium, or a recently irradiated accelerator target. Intense irradiation can cause enough heat to explode explosives and burn metals (think of laser effects).

Cellulose molecules are folded back and forth in a fairly regular arrangement, and they show the properties of crystallinity. This is called a "fibrillar structure." When you rotate the stage of a petrographic microscope with crossed polarizers while looking at a linen fiber, straight lengths change from black through colored to black again every 90?. The fiber is birefringent and has an ordered structure.

When cellulose fibers are heated enough to color them, whether by conduction, convection, or radiation of any kind, water is eliminated from the structure (the cellulose is "dehydrated"). When water is eliminated, C-OH chemical bonds are broken. The C? free radicals formed are extremely reactive, and they will combine with any material in their vicinity. In cellulose, other parts of the cellulose chains may be the closest reactants. The chains crosslink. Crosslinking changes the crystal structure of the cellulose, and you can see the effect with a polarizing microscope.

When cellulose starts to scorch (dehydrate and crosslink), its characteristic crystal structure becomes progressively more chaotic. Its birefringence changes, and not all parts of a straight fiber go through clear transitions from dark to light at the same angle. Zones of order get smaller and smaller. It finally takes on the appearance of a pseudomorph and just scatters light. A significantly scorched fiber does not change color as the stage is rotated between crossed polarizers.



Proton-irradiated fibers by Rinaudo. Little, white, straight lines cutting across the fiber are the paths of the protons.

Specific types of radiation cause specific types of defects in the crystals of flax fibers. For example, protons ionize the cellulose as they pass through the fiber. This warps the crystals, making the protons' paths birefringent. You can see where they went in the fiber by the straight lines of their paths (see the "Proton-irradiated" figure).



Neutron-irradiated fibers from the Lyma mummy wrapping by Moroni. Observe the small, white, vertical streaks made by recoil protons between the bright growth nodes. There is also a faint haze in the background that was made by an associated gamma flux from the re actor.

Not all kinds of radiation ionize the material they penetrate. Neutrons and neutrinos donot have any electrical charge. Neutrinos hardly interact with matter at all, the fact that made them so difficult to detect. They have practically no chance of being stopped as they shoot through the entire diameter of the earth. The effects of neutrons depend on their energy, but they normally interact with hydrogen-containing materials to produce "recoil protons." They knock a hydrogen nucleus out of the material, producing an ionizing proton. You can see the ionization streaks of these (usually lower energy) protons (see the "Neutron-irradiation" figure).

The crystal structure of the flax fibers of the Shroud shows the effects of aging, but it has never been heated enough to change the structure. It has never suffered chemically significant irradiation with either protons or neutrons. No type of radiation that could produce either color in the linen fibers or change the 14C content (radiocarbon age) could go unnoticed. All radiation has some kind of an effect on organic materials.

This proves that the image color could not have been produced by thermal or radiation­induced dehydration of the cellulose. Image formation proceeded at normal temperatures in the absence of energetic radiation of any kind.

Okay, let's say it is a burial shroud of a crucifixion victim. Science cannot in any way, yet thought of, confirm that it is the shroud used by Jesus.

It was rare that crucifixion victims were buried in tombs. We only have one archeological example: the 1968 discovery of a crucifixion victim, named Johanan ben Ha-galgol, found near Jerusalem at Giv’at ha-Mivtar; a crucifixion victim nailed through the wrists and reburied in an ossuaries.

On the rare occassion that someone was buried in the traditional late-Second Temple Jewish manner of burial used by those who could afford it or had a benefactor (as seems to be the case for Jesus) a chain of highly certain events took place. Within hours heavy amines gases would be emitted from the body. Any linen cloth manufactured in the manner outlined by Pliny the Elder in the first century, because it would likely have an evaporation surface of starch fractions and saccharides, and would thus become brown in places as a result of a natural amino/carbonyl reaction. Ray Rogers has shown that to a very high degree the brown color would have image properties. So far, so good. There are problems of diffusion yet to be resolved, if in fact they can be resolved. The fact of the matter is that the Shroud does contain just such a brown, caramel-like substance where there is image.

Could it be Jesus? Consider this: After about two to three days (depending on ambient temperatures, humidity and body chemistry) liquid decomposition products form. These would immediately ravage the cloth and any image that might have formed. By the time anyone opened the tomb for reburial in an ossuary (typically a year) there would be no flesh and certainly no whole cloth.

Could it be Jesus? If a crucifixion victim was buried in a tomb his shroud could only exist if the tomb was open and if the cloth was separated from the body within about three days.

I INFER from the evidence at hand that it was the Shroud of Jesus.

I discuss this in more detail at http://www.shroudstory.com/faq-burial-of-caiaphas.htm

Dan Porter

Spectral analysis has proven that the image color is a dehydrated, oxidated caramel like product; a brown nitrogenous polymers called a melanoidins. It is selective within a carbohydrate film 180 to 800 nanometers thick. This is certain.

It could have been produced by caramelization (heat) or a Maillard reaction (amino/carbonyl) except that enough heat to have formed the image would have ablated the underlying linen severely. Actually, the sun bleaching of an inversion image would have left significant tracks in the fibers. On the Shroud there is no significant radiation track differences between image and non-image areas.

The image can be reduced with diimide and it can be pulled from the fibers with adhesive, or scraped away. More information can be found in the Rogers FAQ at http://www.shroudstory.com

Wilson's creation does not come close to producing an image like that on the Shroud, except to the casual observer. Wilson did not fake the Shroud but faked out the editors of Christianity Today.

Thanks,

Dan