The Shroud of Turin and logic

Today I read an article on CNN headlined "Scientist re-creates Turin Shroud to show it's fake." The article then describes how an Italian professor "created a copy of the shroud by wrapping a specially woven cloth over one of his students, painting it with pigment, baking it in an oven (which he called a "shroud machine") for several hours, then washing it." This, apparently, created a similar effect to the Shroud.

Okay. Fine. The thing is, that doesn't prove anything. For one thing this fellow is hardly the first to show a way to create a similar 'Shroud of Turin' effect; that's been done many times before. More importantly, though, showing a process which produces the same effect as something does not prove that the effect was created by that process. The Tunguska Blast created a similar effect to an A-Bomb, but it is, shall we say, unlikely that an A-Bomb went off in North-Eastern Russia in 1909.

The question I have always wondered about these techniques for creating the Shroud is why on Earth a medieval relic-maker would have gone through all that trouble? As a rule relics weren't very closely examined at the time, so it hardly seems necessary to take all that care to avoid brushstrokes or try to create that cool negative effect (which no one knew about 'til the twentieth century anyway).

The thing is, it's easy for us to take the effect we have before us and try to work backwards to see how it could have been achieved. Looking at it from the other direction, it's hard to see either how or why someone would have gone to all the trouble (not to mention getting human blood to splash all over it, which at its easiest would have meant lugging a corpse around the workshop. Why he would do that when pig's blood would have served just as well in a world with no blood testing is another mystery).

I'm not arguing that the Shroud is genuine. It very well may be, or it very well may be faked. I've heard compelling evidence that it is genuine and some pretty good evidence that it is faked. Frankly, it doesn't really matter that much; the Shroud is not an article of faith. I could point out all sorts of fallacies with this guy's solution (i.e. how did he know to put the nail-wounds in the wrists when all sacred art at the time has them in His palms?) but no matter. My point is that his grandiose claim that he has 'proven' the Shroud to be a fake fails basic logic.

RE: Mst3k and other things

Hi. I know all five of you are probably wondering when the Mst3k reviews are going to resume. Well, frankly, I don't know; I recently had the reconfigure my computer and lost most of my files, including my reviews in progress. What's more, YouTube, my main source of episodes, has apparently taken down the majority of their episodes, so the reviews are on hold until I find another source or someone else starts posting them on YouTube. Sorry.

The good news is that I'm planning on posting other things; specifically some of my own works of fiction-in-progress (some of which has been seen before on Facebook, others will be new).