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Are there any examples of these types of reconstructions where the reconstruction has been performed blind on the skull of someone for which we have photos?
I wonder what the licensing related to the image reconstruction is. Like, am I able to use it for the cover of a biography of his I publish?
It’s a creative work, so in most jurisdictions it’d be subject to copyright and unusable without licensing or the creator explicitly using a license like CC0 that allows free onward reproduction and reworking.
I think this stuff is art with a little bit of informing from science, so it probably is creative, but I wonder what the authors would claim.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article discusses this. The researchers admit they can't know for sure if they got that part right. On the other hand, standards for body size were very different 750 years ago than today, so that's certainly part of it. Legends tend to get more exaggerated over time, and the legend of Thomas Aquinas has had plenty of time for exaggeration to build up.
It's crazy how standards for body size can change over even shorter time periods. I was watching an old game show with Bob Barker and one of the competitions was for people to guess stats about the "average" man, and then run around Hollywood looking for a man who matched that description. So each competitor would guess the average age, height, number of kids, etc. One woman guessed that the average man weighed 180 p…
Are there any examples of these types of reconstructions where the reconstruction has been performed blind on the skull of someone for which we have photos?
Note that the National Library of Medicine is hosted on NIH, and the administration has been scrubbing much of that content, so I think the link works now, but I can't promise that it will stay good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That link just goes to the whole book. For anyone curious: the relevant bit is on page 249, though some pages before and after provide interesting context. "The same thing is affirmed by [long list] of Albertus Magnus ; who, as the most expert, had made an entire man of the same metal[1], and had spent 30 years without any interruption in forming him under several Aspects and Constellations. [...] and being put and f…
It may be possible to come up with something like an analog version of Markov chains. As you turn a crank words keep sounding out based on probability.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article discusses this. The researchers admit they can't know for sure if they got that part right. On the other hand, standards for body size were very different 750 years ago than today, so that's certainly part of it. Legends tend to get more exaggerated over time, and the legend of Thomas Aquinas has had plenty of time for exaggeration to build up.
It's crazy how standards for body size can change over even shorter time periods. I was watching an old game show with Bob Barker and one of the competitions was for people to guess stats about the "average" man, and then run around Hollywood looking for a man who matched that description. So each competitor would guess the average age, height, number of kids, etc. One woman guessed that the average man weighed 180 p…
That old OLine gets killed in P5 college football now.
> “Now, it could be that on the whole we’re a lot larger now than even overweight medievals were, or that St. Thomas was never the portly friar described by his legend,” Father Aquinas quipped, adding, “Regardless, the stories of St. Thomas’ size are probably exaggerated.” According to Martin Luther (who may have had an interest in discrediting him), Thomas Aquinas was able to devour an entire goose, and a piece of h…
With all respect to Martin Luther, he was also enormously rotund. Gluttony seems to have been the main vice of several important theologians.
Isn't this reconstruction a bit on the slim side? Aquinas was reportedly, let's say, a man of portly presence. I can't find a scholarly source on the matter, at the moment, but here are two quotes I found on the website of a nun[1] (no less, so probably written in good faith): > St. Thomas was a huge heavy bull of a man, fat and slow and quiet; very mild and magnanimous but not very sociable; shy, even apart from the…
The idea that St. Thomas Aquinas was "portly" or even obese is likely an exaggeration that occurred over time due to overemphasis of certain aspects of his appearance. Early accounts depict him as being both very tall and strong having a big head , often with a build closer to a wrestler or football player than that of an obese man. As far as I can tell, St. Thomas was certainly an imposing figure but people have dec…
The article, on the other hand, makes a point that the skull is quite small… (which seems to be the principal argument for the rather slim reconstruction)
At this point, it's probably really more a case of iconography (which, for the most, features Aquinas as one of the most prominent portly men in history) than of actual history. But, I think, any concepts or notions guiding the reconstruction should have been provided, and I'm kind of missing these.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a creative work, so in most jurisdictions it’d be subject to copyright and unusable without licensing or the creator explicitly using a license like CC0 that allows free onward reproduction and reworking.
Is it creative? If it's derived algorithmically from a collection of facts, it wouldn't be covered. I think this stuff is art with a little bit of informing from science, so it probably is creative, but I wonder what the authors would claim.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's crazy how standards for body size can change over even shorter time periods. I was watching an old game show with Bob Barker and one of the competitions was for people to guess stats about the "average" man, and then run around Hollywood looking for a man who matched that description. So each competitor would guess the average age, height, number of kids, etc. One woman guessed that the average man weighed 180 p…
Similarly, 70s Steve Wozniak was supposed to be kinda chubby, but people this millennium seeing those old photos are like "what? he's totally average?"