I’m going to interrupt our current series of blogs on One-Sentence Summaries of novels, to make a quick announcement. Tomorrow, we’ll get back to business.
Ahem, my announcement: I have recently had yet another work of art published. This one is not a book, it’s an article.
A little backstory first. As many of my loyal blog readers know, I’ve been a part of the evolving story of the alleged Jesus family tomb since it was announced about a year ago with much fanfare. Like most everyone else on the planet, I am skeptical that this tomb ever housed the mortal remains of Jesus of Nazareth. Of course, it’s possible. The question is — what are the odds?
Being a theoretical physicist and a troublemaker with far too much time on my hands, I have written some articles over the past year that got me quite a bit of notice. In fact, back in late October of last year, a statistics peer-reviewed journal, The Annals of Applied Statistics, asked me to be a referee for the forthcoming paper by Prof. Andrey Feuerverger, the statistician who was hired to analyze the alleged Jesus family tomb.
So I spent a considerable part of November and December reviewing Dr. Feuerverger’s article and writing a response article. I also took the opportunity to do some new calculations to improve on my previous work. One rather unusual issue was that Dr. Feuerverger requested that his paper NOT be circulated prior to publication. (Normally, academics are only too happy to get preprints out as far and as fast as possible.) So I honored that request, and in fact have not really made any public comments on the tomb controversy.
But now Dr. Feuerverger’s article has been published, along with comments by eight referees, including mine. I have posted a new article on my web site that summarizes all the new info (many, many pages in the journal, not to mention a 29 page supplementary article that the journal asked me to include on their web site that details my latest calculations).
You can read all about it in my article: Analysis of Andrey Feuerverger’s Article on the Jesus Family Tomb. I know not all of you will be interested in this, nor will all of you even understand why I’ve put so many hours of my time into this apparently absurd project. The answer is that it was just something I wanted to do, and I didn’t think anyone else would do it quite the way I wanted. So I did it.
Tomorrow, we’ll continue on with our study of those pesky One-Sentence Summaries. See ya then!