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Re: orion Re: Date of Scrolls Deposit--55 BCE?

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Don´t be silly, Sigrid. Barbara Thiering´s error in Jerusalem was in
assuming that individual C-14 readings have any weight. No one working in
the C-14 field suffers from that delusion.

Any experimentalist knows that there is a gap between the status arte of
praxis and the ideal outcomes predicted by theory. This is, of course, what
led Gauss to attempt to provide rules for when and in what circumstances it
is permissible to exclude inconvenient data, a problem the astromers of his
day found quite vexing. Among his recommendations was the suggestion that
one try to identify the causes of outcomes that diverge from expectations
in a systematic fashion. Greg has proposed precisely that in his assumption
that there is a question of contamination in conjunction with some of the
results of C-14 tests performed on the  DSS. Fortunately, it is an
assumption that can be tested by subjecting pieces of ancient, dated,
parchment deliberately to castor oil and other contaminants, then
subjecting them to the routine cleaning procedures used in C-14 labs, and
then testing them in the ordinary (AMS) manner. If the results are skewed
as expected, then a systematic offset will have been demonstrated. This
very test is being conducted right now by Kaare Lund Rasmussen, curator of
the radiocarbon lab of the National Museum in Copenhagen.

I don´t see any reason to comment on your absurd recapitulation of a logic
primer; but your claim that palaeographic date assessments are comparable
to psychological and/or medical "diagnoses" boggles the mind.  Please stop
this nonsense, if you want to be taken seriously.



Frederick H. Cryer
Assoc. Prof. for Research
Univ. of Copenhagen
Faculty of Theology
Købmagergade 44-46
1150 København K.
e-mail: fc.dss@pop.teol.ku.dk
fax: (045) 35 32 36 52