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X-rays reveal censored portions of Marie Antoinette’s letters to Swedish count
- podiki 5y agoThe most, um, interesting thing I learned from this was about "soaking"...[0] [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/akgb88/viral-jump-humping-tiktok-teaches-the-world-about-mormon-sex https://www.vice.com/en/article/akgb88/viral-jump-humping-ti...
- EdwardDiego 5y agoYeah, I too enjoyed learning about soaking and having your friend jump on the bed beside you. Ah, God bless all the horny teenagers trying to rationalise their way around a belief system derived from an Iron Age society. Always puts me in mind of a certain Garfunkel and Oates song. (nsfw)[1] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ZF_R_j0OY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ZF_R_j0OY
- boomboomsubban 5y agoOf all the millions of mysteries throughout history, why are we wasting time on Marie Antoinette's love life? This article is already nearly tabloid journalism, and I bet this story shows up in actual tabloids soon.
- Eikon 5y agoWhat is not interesting to you may be interesting to others. Someone "wasting" time on something you don't think useful doesn't prevent others working on something else. It's not like society is bound to work on one thing at a time...
- boomboomsubban 5y agoThe resources available for this kind of work are limited, this is a new kind of x-ray that presumably has limited machines available and a high operating cost. And I didn't say uninteresting. The authour of the letters purposefully removed the lines from the historical record for modesty's sake. It's similar to digging through a celebrity's trash to find salacious gossip.
- Eikon 5y ago> The authour of the letters purposefully removed the lines from the historical record for modesty's sake How to know before finding out?
- boomboomsubban 5y agoFrom the context of the letters, the rest of the words and where they were found. He seems to have only edited a few lines throughout letters. At most, checking one of the letters would have been enough.
- CyanBird 5y agoWell, now they have used a new novel system to bypass the censorship If you fail to see the value of how this novel way can be used for other letters beyond this initial test case, then there's not much else to say I feel
- boomboomsubban 5y ago>If you fail to see the value of how this novel way can be used for other letters beyond this initial test case This initial test case based on a technique already in practice on other sources of writing? None of my posts have dismissed the technology, just it's use in this case.
- bloqs 5y agoThis is a fallacy that is mostly driven by difference in personality. People are roughly divided into people who are driven and interested by "things" (nearly the entirety of this website) and people who are interested and driven by "people". There is some crossover with objectification of people but thats not relevant. Scientific methods relating to historical and archeological discovery are immensely important, this article in particular highlights something that may indicate many other hisorical letters/documents may contain previously missed information that while likely mostly mundane minutae, a shining example could alter how we understand history and the interplay of historical figures. That said it seems this just referencing a less common use of a specific technology to solve a problem which I suppose is appropriate
- boomboomsubban 5y agoThe scientific process is interesting, and I don't object to it's use on Egyptian papyrus or the Dead Sea Scrolls. I find it unlikely anyone was expecting to find some revelatory details in the letters between Marie Antoinette and her alleged lover. They just wanted to know more about her intimate affairs.
- Armisael16 5y agoThis was really more of a proof of technique. Marie Antoinette’s letters were readily available (the team is French). The article on Ars is pretty shit at conveying that - you have to get to the 7th paragraph for any technical details to come up - but that’s an(other) indictment of Ms. Oulette, not the research team.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoFrom the article >So when Fabien Pottier and several colleagues at the Museum of Natural History's Research Center for the Conservation of Collections (CRCC) took on the task of uncovering the censored portions of letters between Marie Antoinette and von Fersen, they naturally turned to similar techniques. That doesn't sound like developing the method was their primary goal.
- slim 5y agoActually it seems most of the information about Marie antoinette were actually politically motivated slurs made up during revolution. So it's still interesting to distinguish history from propaganda about her libertine life. I think it's particularly interesting in our context, to study what slurs are still repeated aftet two centuries
- rightbyte 5y agoCome on. Reading redacted text in hustorical records is an interesting achievement. I guess the authors hoped for more interesting secrets then kind words that might be interpreted as love letters?
- boomboomsubban 5y agoI doubt it, they picked the letters between Marie Antoinette and her alleged lover for a reason.
- mongol 5y agoCan you suggest some historical mysteries that do not receive attention but should? It is my impression that the broad strokes of history are well covered so it is on this level that historical research now takes place. The bonds between Swedish and French nobility during this time period are interesting. About twenty years after these events, one of Napoleon's marshals was offered the Swedish crown and became king of Sweden.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago>Can you suggest some historical mysteries that do not receive attention but should? The article mentions the process being used on Egyptian papyrus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. There are countless other recovered bits of parchment that the process could be used on from around the world, possibly uncovering more primary sources about antiquity. Or just like any other of von Fersen's letters would probably be more illuminating about French Swedish relations, though I don't know if they were censored. His fondness of Antoinette was already known.
- fsslrisrchr 5y agoAgreed, I'd be pretty pissed if letters I wrote to a lover were published even if I were dead for hundreds of years. It's my private correspondence. Not all y'all's. It's the same reason why I'm annoyed that they disturb sarcophaguses and put a mummy on display. clearly Pharaoh didn't want to be on public display, or he wouldn't have built a pyramid full of traps to hide in. And you're right. They choose the redacted love letters on purpose. To appeal to that basest of human instincts, gossip, to ensure more funding. This is why on my will I clearly stipulate that I want my body interred in the most biodegradable material (I don't like cremation) and I plan to move all my personal information on an encrypted medium whose key only I know in case they disobey my orders to destroy it.
- junon 5y agoLet people enjoy stuff.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoPlease post all the love letters you have ever written or received, without any editing. Let people enjoy stuff.
- junon 5y agoThis is reductio ad absurdum and a clear strawman.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoI'm asking you to be put in basically the same situation, not an opposite one. The biggest difference is I'm asking for your permission. My argument was never that Antoinette deserves some special privacy, so changing the subject of the act is not a strawman. Why should people enjoy someone else's private correspondence but not yours?
- junon 5y agoI'm still alive, I haven't been dead 200 years. Do whatever you want with my private correspondence when I've been dead for 200 years.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoSo you're fine with your private correspondence being public long after your death. Does it matter that von Fersen clearly wasnt? He knew his letters would be public and purposely blacked out parts.
- junon 5y agoSure why not. I'm dead. It has zero impact on me. It might even help historians understand our way of life, in which case by all means. I'm not so selfish and conceited that I pretend to still care about things after death, lol.
- bitzlab 5y agoX-rays are still one of the best piece of technology. Thanks to the we can still hope that on a day wee will have sun glasses which will allow us to see trough women clothes. I've seen this version: https://natrmd.com https://natrmd.com
- marginalia_nu 5y ago> Dear Sweden > I just heard. What the fuck? I really liked Descartes! I sent him over so we could share, and you go killing him?! Fuck. This is why we can't have nice things. > Toodles, Marie.
- dcow 5y agoI guess we can just assume that one day all our encrypted communications and records will be deciphered by future historians.
- formerly_proven 5y agoFWIW symmetric encryption has been really solid for a long time. DES, pretty much the first strong civilian encryption algorithm, is crackable due to brute-forcing the 56-bit key space, which has been pointed out as a security problem almost 50 years ago, but in terms of cryptanalysis it's doing ok. AES will turn 25 soon and the best cryptanalyses today are like a factor four faster than brute-force (but require rather significant memory, which brute force doesn't), which is basically nothing.
- k__ 5y agoThis could get a bit awkward for the people who freeze themselves.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoMight be a long time though right? > On average, to brute-force attack AES-256, one would need to try 2^255 keys. (This is the total size of the key space divided by 2, because on average, you'll find the answer after searching half the key space.) So the time taken to perform this attack, measured in years, is simply 2^255 / 2,117.8 trillion > Expressed as an exponent of 10, that’s 2.73 * 1061. Written in full format: >27,337,893,038, 406,611, 194,430,009, 974,922,940, 323,611,067, 429,756,962, 487,493,203 years. >In English: 27 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years. From-https://scrambox.com/article/brute-force-aes/ https://scrambox.com/article/brute-force-aes/ I’d love to hear Hacker News opinions on how long that will be valid due to faster computers, quantum computing etc. Or if it will always pretty much be valid in your opinion? The number they get for all the PCs on earth trying it is still 13,689 trillion trillion trillion trillion years. The universe is only 14 billion years old and estimates of what the universe will be like in even a trillion years are more like science fiction than science because it is so wildly long.
- moralestapia 5y ago
- Armisael16 5y agoThe research team was doing to as a technical proof of concept using readily-available letters. They didn’t especially care about Marie Antoinette. The Ars article is terrible at conveying this; you have to get to the 7th paragraph to get even the first hints of this. I usually expect better from them.
- tibyat 5y agoI agree. I was trying to find out what synchrotron they used, Ars doesnt say! Went to read the paper, apparently they used some portable device for the xrf instead.
- gotmedium 5y ago> Hyperspectral imaging in the visible and near-infrared ranges initially seemed promising. Unfortunately, the black redaction ink absorbed almost all light in the visible range, and in the NIR range, the two inks were rendered largely transparent. They were too similar to draw any conclusive results. Pottier and his collaborators got the best results with X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy in a microscanning mode Does anyone know what are the other use cases for these techniques? The article is very interesting! Thanks for sharing
- somebodynew 5y agoNon-imaging X-ray fluorescence is one of the most common techniques for identifying the elemental composition of metal alloys, including both industrial metallurgy and verification of gold and silver coins in precious metals trading. Handheld XRF scanners are readily available but cost several thousand dollars.
- sysihyk 5y agoMakes me wonder how destructive this X-ray scan was.