New technique reveals centuries of secrets in locked letters

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/science/locked-letters-unfolding.html

by duck • 5 years ago

34 17 5 years ago

neonate• 5 years ago

aphroz• 5 years ago

Too bad that we will leave nothing comparable from our times. In 1000 years historian will probably have nothing to study about us.

LeoPanthera• 5 years ago

Thanks to institutions such as the Internet Archive, I do not believe that is true.

They are a non-profit and deserve your support! https://archive.org/donate

rtrdea• 5 years ago

Agreed. I have a monthly donation automatically taken out of my account

tasogare2• 5 years ago

Internet Archive is not immune to collapse of civilization. In fact, such kind of service would probably be the first to be abandoned in case of war or serious disaster. It also requires electricity and I don’t think that organization have it’s own power generation capable of running in autarky for centuries.

thaumasiotes• 5 years ago

Letters from 1000 years ago obviously have great historical value, but it's not like they're the only kind of record that exists. We still print books, newspapers, government edicts, contracts, invoices, and photographs. We still hang plaques.

holoduke• 5 years ago

There will always be a lunatic who encoded his entire usb stick in a granite block somewhere to be found in a 1000 years from now.

cosmodisk• 5 years ago

And at the bottom of the stone it said: stone overflow.

pestatije• 5 years ago

You'll see in older cemeteries granite engraving is not that good at preserving info.

mbg721• 5 years ago

On the scale of millennia, I wouldn't be too worried; disasters happen to any storage medium, and even our knowledge of Greek and Roman society today comes from surprisingly few sources. I think the bigger concern is the near-term effect of something like an EMP event, the digital library of papyruses burning down.

w0de0• 5 years ago

In a 1000 years there will be PhDs specializing in just the analysis of Twitter during 2016.

ajcp• 5 years ago

...that lets them read old letters that were mailed not in envelopes but in the writing paper itself after being folded into elaborate enclosures.

How did that monstrosity get past editing?

howtowin• 5 years ago

Maybe it’s the fact that I am not seeing the surrounding context with your quote, but it reads fine to me.

Perhaps it is my own way of thinking & writing which enables this. I was told by my mother that she knows when she’s reading something I wrote versus my siblings.

Otherwise, perhaps it is related to when one reads misspelled or incomplete words, yet our brains enable us to understand what was meant anyway, and in some cases, this is only consciously realized upon a second read.

tasogare2• 5 years ago

Native language probably helps (or hinders) too. In French it’s common to cram 3-4 different information belonging to various level of concerns in a single sentence so I didn’t bat an either at processing the quote.

JdeBP• 5 years ago

As dsq points out, maybe ajcp was talking about the punctuation. It could do with a couple of commas.

hedora• 5 years ago

It looks fine to me. A lot of the press targets a 6-8th grade reading level. This sentence structure probably violates those rules, I guess.

dsq• 5 years ago

I would have expected: ...mailed, not in envelopes, but rather...

New technique reveals centuries of secrets in locked letters

Related Stories