Grondin's GJW Roundup

[Stephan Huller]

Exactly. These people are so reactionary. I am friends with most of them on Facebook or was corresponding directly with them when the initial testing came out. They were running scared and settled on this new set of arguments (and an incredible public relations blitz) to make everyone forget that the ink is ancient. And it worked! It reminds me of a Republican talking point ... mostly because these are mostly conservatives.

I remember when the cry with Mar Saba was 'test the ink.' But now we see that these people won't accept ink testing UNLESS IT FAVORS FORGERY. So what's the point of even having debates? It reminds me when I play soccer with my son in the backyard. 'That goal didn't count, I wasn't ready.' 'Injury! Doesn't count.' 'Penalty! No goal.' If this was any other field the lot of them would be run out of the university. But it's religion so its okay to be childish. As long as you pick the 'right side' to be on.

[Peter Kirby]

I think this is interesting from http://www.examiner.com/article/jesus-s ... ed-genuine

Scientific American reported that, “Swager used infrared spectroscopy, which analyzes the low-frequency light from an object, to see if the ink showed any inconsistencies or variations that would suggest it was a recent forgery. None were found”.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/di ... id=9226247

I looked about for a way to read his article for the past half hour with no easy solution for now. Perhaps I should have made a copy when it was up for anyone to download.

Can you explain what the infrared spectroscopy shows? What kind of inconsistencies are they looking for, and what would cause them? What can be ruled out by this test and what cannot?

Thus the only chemist to actually test the ink,

(For what it matters, there were at least three scientists, including Swager, involved in just the one paper being mentioned. Moreover, there are two others who analyzed the chemical nature of the ink, in a separate paper. That makes at least five.)

a chemist at what is probably the best scientific institution in the country, M.I.T., found it to be genuine and found no evidence of it being a recent forgery.

The statement "found it to be genuine" is your own gloss. It is not equivalent to Swager's statements. With all respect to the fine people at MIT.

[PhilosopherJay]

Hi Stephan Huller,

The trick of finding that the letters in the document matched other Greek or Coptic fragment letters at a certain point also reminded me of Republican misuse of statistics. Specifically in this case of alleged voter fraud in North Carolina:

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/voter-fraud- ... -so-fast-0

Supposedly 765 cases were found with people in North Carolina having the same first and last name, birthdate and last four social security numbers with voters from other states. One has to do just ten minutes of research to prove that this does not prove a single case of voter fraud. Most people do not have unique names. Over 46,000 people have the name John Smith in the United States. With 365 possible birthdates, that meant that 46,000/365 or 126 people should have the same first name and last name and birthdate. However, there is not just one person who has the name John Smith and voted in North Carolina. North Carolina has about 10 million people or a little over 3% of the U.S. population. If we assume half voted, that's 1.5% of the 46,000 people with the name John Smith or 690 people named John Smith voting in North Carolina. Thus 690 John Smith Voters X 126 people should have the first and last name and birthdate or 86,940 matches.

Since there are 9,999 possible combinations of last four digits in social security numbers, we divide the 86,940 matches by 9,999 and find that 8.7 people who voted in North Carolina named John Smith should have the same first name and last name, birthdate and social security number as another John Smith in the United States.

One might respond that most people do not have the name John Smith and therefore the odds of finding the same first name, last name, birthdate, and social security number is less with everybody else. However, one should remember that most people do not have unique names. For example there are 105 people named Harry Potter in the United States. It seems that over 95% of Americans do not have unique names. That means that over 95% of the 4,505,372 people voting in the last election in North Carolina or 4,275,000 have a chance of having another person with the same Last name, first name, birthdate, and last four digits of the social security number matching somebody else. Add up all those chances and you are bound to get 100s or 1,000s of hits. My bet is that no matter how much money North Carolina spends investing the 765 matching cases, they will not find one single person who voted in North Carolina and another state using the same name, birthday and social security number.

To look at it another way, everything depends on sample size. The odds of one person tossing a coin 10 times and getting 10 heads in a row is 1 in 1024 (.097656%). On the other hand, if you have 1024 people tossing coins 10 times in a row, the odds are 1 in 2 or 50% that someone is going to do it.

In the same way, there are 33 letters in the coptic alphabet, but they are not all used equally. As it resembles the Greek alphabet, probably 5 or 6 letters get used the majority of time to begin or end a word. If you have a 1,000 fragments, you should find plenty of cases where all the beginning and ending letters from a seven line document match the beginning and ending letters of some lines from other fragments. In the three or four different claims about the alleged forgery matching letters, none of them included any indication of the sample size of fragments they were working from. Thus all these hypotheses were misleading and rhetorical as the Republican claims of voter fraud were in North Carolina.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

Exactly. These people are so reactionary. I am friends with most of them on Facebook or was corresponding directly with them when the initial testing came out. They were running scared and settled on this new set of arguments (and an incredible public relations blitz) to make everyone forget that the ink is ancient. And it worked! It reminds me of a Republican talking point ... mostly because these are mostly conservatives.

I remember when the cry with Mar Saba was 'test the ink.' But now we see that these people won't accept ink testing UNLESS IT FAVORS FORGERY. So what's the point of even having debates? It reminds me when I play soccer with my son in the backyard. 'That goal didn't count, I wasn't ready.' 'Injury! Doesn't count.' 'Penalty! No goal.' If this was any other field the lot of them would be run out of the university. But it's religion so its okay to be childish. As long as you pick the 'right side' to be on.

[PhilosopherJay]

Hi Peter,

Good points. Like everybody, I'm doing seventeen things at once. This will take some time to research.

If anybody else knows more, please feel free to pitch in.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

I think this is interesting from http://www.examiner.com/article/jesus-s ... ed-genuine

Scientific American reported that, “Swager used infrared spectroscopy, which analyzes the low-frequency light from an object, to see if the ink showed any inconsistencies or variations that would suggest it was a recent forgery. None were found”.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/di ... id=9226247

I looked about for a way to read his article for the past half hour with no easy solution for now. Perhaps I should have made a copy when it was up for anyone to download.

Can you explain what the infrared spectroscopy shows? What kind of inconsistencies are they looking for, and what would cause them? What can be ruled out by this test and what cannot?

Thus the only chemist to actually test the ink,

(For what it matters, there were at least three scientists, including Swager, involved in just the one paper being mentioned. Moreover, there are two others who analyzed the chemical nature of the ink, in a separate paper. That makes at least five.)

a chemist at what is probably the best scientific institution in the country, M.I.T., found it to be genuine and found no evidence of it being a recent forgery.

The statement "found it to be genuine" is your own gloss. It is not equivalent to Swager's statements. With all respect to the fine people at MIT.

[andrewcriddle]

I think this is interesting from http://www.examiner.com/article/jesus-s ... ed-genuine

Scientific American reported that, “Swager used infrared spectroscopy, which analyzes the low-frequency light from an object, to see if the ink showed any inconsistencies or variations that would suggest it was a recent forgery. None were found”.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/di ... id=9226247

I looked about for a way to read his article for the past half hour with no easy solution for now. Perhaps I should have made a copy when it was up for anyone to download.

Can you explain what the infrared spectroscopy shows? What kind of inconsistencies are they looking for, and what would cause them? What can be ruled out by this test and what cannot?

Thus the only chemist to actually test the ink,

(For what it matters, there were at least three scientists, including Swager, involved in just the one paper being mentioned. Moreover, there are two others who analyzed the chemical nature of the ink, in a separate paper. That makes at least five.)

a chemist at what is probably the best scientific institution in the country, M.I.T., found it to be genuine and found no evidence of it being a recent forgery.

The statement "found it to be genuine" is your own gloss. It is not equivalent to Swager's statements. With all respect to the fine people at MIT.

From the abstract Swager et al found similar results for both the John fragment and the GJW, therefore either the John fragment is ancient (which IMO is unlikely) or the spectroscopy tests are not sufficient to exclude forgery.

Andrew Criddle

[Peter Kirby]

The statement "found it to be genuine" is your own gloss. It is not equivalent to Swager's statements. With all respect to the fine people at MIT.

From the abstract Swager et al found similar results for both the John fragment and the GJW, therefore either the John fragment is ancient (which IMO is unlikely) or the spectroscopy tests are not sufficient to exclude forgery.

I did notice that the John fragment was used as a "control."

I am not so sure that my knowledge of the study and of infrared spectroscopy is, right now, sufficient to say that nothing else is determined from the study.

Are you sure that the tests don't show anything else, or that what they show doesn't extend beyond "similarity" of the two (and that this similarity has no further significance beyond what you've implied)?

[andrewcriddle]

The statement "found it to be genuine" is your own gloss. It is not equivalent to Swager's statements. With all respect to the fine people at MIT.

From the abstract Swager et al found similar results for both the John fragment and the GJW, therefore either the John fragment is ancient (which IMO is unlikely) or the spectroscopy tests are not sufficient to exclude forgery.

I did notice that the John fragment was used as a "control."

I am not so sure that my knowledge of the study and of infrared spectroscopy is, right now, sufficient to say that nothing else is determined from the study.

Are you sure that the tests don't show anything else, or that what they show doesn't extend beyond "similarity" of the two (and that this similarity has no further significance beyond what you've implied)?

Hi Peter

I've only been able to read the abstract. I'm not sure what exactly was tested, my point was that both fragments appear to have passed. IF both fragments are modern then a comparison between them would not prove anything much.

It might have been better if controls that were unarguably authentic and controls of known modern writing with carbon ink on old papyrus had been included.

Andrew Criddle

[Peter Kirby]

It might have been better if controls that were unarguably authentic and controls of known modern writing with carbon ink on old papyrus had been included.

I agree about that, of course.

However, I don't know if there is data that can be salvaged about the comparison of the different parts of the papyrus under infrared microspectroscopy.

It's unusual that a fragment ever goes back to the lab; at least, that is my general impression. We may have to make the best of whatever we got back this time.