West Point discovers time capsule from 1828
westpoint.edu
westpoint.edu
I wonder if there’s a book out there that traces their lives from West Point to Appomattox. I found a book recently that did a similar thing with Wellington (following him through his India campaigns) and Napoleon (starting in Egypt.) Although I don’t think they ever met before Waterloo. (Or even if they personally met at all, actually.)
The Generals - Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee ; Authors Nancy Scott Anderson and Dwight Anderson (1989) ; ISBN 0-394-75985-0
My cousin "loaned" me this book years ago. One day I will return it.
It does what you ask - following each man's life from childhood through the surrender at Appomattox and includes a nice bibliography, chapter notes, etc. I found it a fascinating read that offered up so many details one would not expect. For any lover of history this is a great book contrasting two of the most important people in that conflict.
I haven't read it yet, but have heard it's an enjoyable read.
"Simon Scarrow: The Wellington And Napoleon Quartet".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsemanship_of_Ulysses_S._Gra...
The obvious answer is pretty simple: graduation order determined time-in-rank seniority, so they were considered for promotion before anyone else, and this both continues and compounds throughout their career.
Is there an actual correlation to military performance? Probably, and probably slightly more so for the academy than other schools, because of the way that subjects are taught. I later went to several other name-recognizable universities, and there are large differences in the pace and depth of what is taught and tested, with the academy having a much greater pace over much more material at a much lighter depth, so it’s kind of like testing your ability to take in a lot of information very quickly and react to it, rather than master a domain of knowledge and creatively expand upon it.
There is also a social effect of named leaders to gain support among a cohort, especially in ‘minority’ populations, which are formed by commissioning source in the military officer corps. For example, Westmoreland was “first rat” at The Citadel, which has a much lower admission standard than West Point, but it was a brutal program with fierce advocacy among graduates.
One of his classmates in the class of 1936, Benjamin O. Davis Jr, was the first African-American to attend West Point in nearly 50 years, and would go on to lead the Tuskegee Airmen into battle. Davis suffered from a set of social isolation during his entire four years at USMA, never had a roommate, no one talked to him during meals, no one talked to him outside of class, he was not invited to dances or social events, etc. trying to drive him out of the Academy and return it to the all-White way it had been. Apparently Westmoreland wasn't one of the ring-leaders of this ostracism, but as First Captain it sure as hell was his job to stop it, and he failed to do so.
This started a pattern for Westmoreland, of being wrong about things but getting promoted anyway, that continued for the rest of his life. _Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam_ by US Army in Vietnam veteran Lewis Sorely, is appropriately scathing of the man and his failures.
Software has always been a special case because despite some naysayers, it is quite meritocratic compared to other fields. Your degree might boost your ability to get an interview, but in a good technical interview, the good coder without a degree is generally going to stand out from a bad coder even if they have a degree from a prestigious university.
The other side of the parabola are smart kids who worked hard on things they found interesting, which just happened to not be school
The very smart and very hard working are of course the shoe-ins. And then it's either the very smart and lazy or moderately smart and very hard working who are next most likely.
But the moderately smart and moderately hard working just get lost in the crowd.
Being a semi-competent officer with some experience basically guaranteed that you’d be fast tracked to a senior command.
e.g. Grant left the military in 1854 and was just a captain when the war started. In about 4 months he was already a brigadier general
Being at the top of your cohort from the beginning has a number of advantages. Your name is known from the very start. Big things are expected and big opportunities are presented. There is probably a very strong personal commitment to a military career by those bothering to achieve top scores, and not being a career captain, but aiming for colonel or above.
Being the top of the class also puts a person on a track that is even promotable to the very top. A 2nd lieutenant supply officer just isn't on the same trajectory as a high profile infantry officer commanding a forwardly deploy combat unit.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_class_the_stars_fell_on
1. West Point does a very good job of selecting for and rewarding the same traits that lead to career success.
2. The most successful military leaders (especially in wartime) become famous, far beyond the most successful doctors or lawyers. 12 of them became US Presidents, but this has been true since ancient times. The guy with the best grades in Harvard Medical School might have a fantastically successful career, but you haven't heard of him.
Unfortunately we still need them for now.
Skip the speeches.
A difficult to x-ray lead box sounds like the ideal use case for neutron imaging.
Remember Al Capone’s Vault (1986)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_Al_Capone%27s_V...
Finding a time capsule and then opening it at 195 years rather than 200 years seems very much like you just don’t want someone five years from now to get to do it instead of you.
Will another ~2.5% of elapsed time really make much of a difference?
Also, why shouldn't the people who discovered it get to open it at this point?
People bury time capsules in the hopes that it is unearthed 50 or 100 or 200 or 1000 years
You'll notice that most time capsules are buried with the expectation that it is unearthed on non-arbitrary dates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_capsules
> Also, why shouldn't the people who discovered it get to open it at this point?
The people who created the time capsules, if given the choice, would probably want it opened in 2028 rather than 2023.
This sentence seems to imply that the capsule is from 1854, 26 years after 1828.
Cadets would not have founded West Point, so the sentence already switched to the context of what those cadets did (in 1828).
Academy officials determined the capsule was placed in the base of the Kosciuszko monument by cadets in 1828, 26 years after the academy’s founding.
I would have said:
> [...] base of the monument by cadets in 1828, 26 years after the academy's founding.
This is a reminder of how quickly things are forgotten. In this case, the presence of the time capsule was forgotten within the span of less than 200 years. I suppose those who placed the capsule could have done so under complete secrecy. More likely a few people knew about it, but that knowledge just disappeared with those who knew it.
Lesson learned here is to make sure to add things which won't decay :)
Putting it in the base of a statue was also smart, instead of burying it somewhere or encasing it in the foundations. Somewhere public and obvious, but still hidden.
Quick is subjective.
Homo was controlling fire probably half a million years ago and crafting stone tools 2 million years ago or more
"The Great Pyramid of Giza is the largest Egyptian pyramid and served as the tomb of pharaoh Khufu, who ruled during the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom."
Maybe not a time capsule in that sense of the word, but still.
The capsule should be resealed again and passed forward to the next generation 200 years from now, perhaps with a note from our current time.
https://www.youtube.com/live/VNJRWKCtKqo?si=_Tlp6lgPozaqDN4x
Or research the library in case someone wrote about the time capsule.
"Heh, someone's going to find this long after I'm dead and open it to find nothing but a chunk of dust, and they're going to think it was important!"
Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal. Send me a note by wire, baby my heart's on fire!
I wonder how many of them yield eg low background radiation sources, air samples insulated from contemporary changes, tree ring data with specific times, previously unseen sources of confirmatory data about other things, extractable DNA, colour swatches preserved from UV light, whisky bottle residue..
To keep track of where it is, thousands of copies of "The Book of Record" were distributed to libraries around the world. If you want a copy, it's about $10 on eBay.
When trying to predict how people in 200 years will view today's civilization, looking back 200 years into the past is a poor approach. Just because phlogiston theory was garbage, doesn't mean we should expect our understanding of combustion to turn out to be equally flawed. I've read about modern time capsules containing descriptions in hundreds of different languages, including pictograms and algorithms, instructions for bootstrapping data retrieval devices, earthquake safety taking into account plate tectonics tens of thousands of years into the future etc... Such projects today are most certainly not just putting a bunch of stuff in a closed chamber and leaving future generations to puzzle about why.
They also collect community sourced air, dive schools and dive charter boats ring them up and say "we've got a cylinder which sat out back from 1972 do you want it" and they get an albiet dirtier, less certain view of the air, at that place and time.
Future science is going to have a field day.
A couple of well established air samples from when scientific glass blowing first happened have also been found I believe. Obviously collection techniques impart different qualities, but it's still amazing what you can do, with a reasonably well authenticated pocket of air of known provenance.
Look at Buddhism or stoicism as examples. The deeply nuanced and detailed understanding of human behaviour in some writing is almost dumbfounding at times. You can learn so much from it. Sure, there are weird parts too. But kids these days like skibidi toilet, and I know people who like tv shows about guessing if something is made out of cake or not. We’re as weird as ever.
The influence of the moon and the sun on weather and tides.
Where baby animals come from.
How to make beer and bread.
The ancients noticed patterns, but had almost no causative understanding of what was happening.
> The influence of the moon and the sun on weather and tides.
Even Newton didn't correctly understand how tides actually work (there is no oceanic "tidal bulge"). It took until Laplace for dynamic theory to be developed. The ancients were unable to predict tides except by repeated observation of a specific location.
> Where baby animals come from.
There was zero understanding of biological reproduction before the modern era. Claiming that people 2000 years ago understood this phenomenon "almost as well as we do" is absurd. They didn't even know about sperm cells, nevermind chromosomes or DNA.
> How to make beer and bread.
Alchemy, with no insight into what was really going on.
The ancients understood none of the things you mention even remotely as well as we do today. In fact, I'd argue that they essentially didn't understand them at all.
Very few people trying for a baby think about DNA. They think about the fertility of the woman in terms of her menstrual cycle. Thats practical science which has been unchanged for a very long time.
You're not wrong. I am literally wrong of course. Figuratively I think I'm less wrong than you say.
Knowing when the beer is ready is a damn sight less than the chemistry done by even a good number of amateur home brewers these days. Knowing the sheep are pregnant is a far cry from the directed breeding done even at small farms today, to say nothing of the genetic programs at larger ones.
If you think their work was trivial, you might not understand how competent and insightful they were, or how little so many aspects of this knowledge and these theories have changed in thousands of years.
I think today's explosion of LLMs etc will lead (eventually) to actual understanding. Data precedes theory.
You're thinking of nuclear waste? Not representative of today's time capsule, any more than space shuttle software development is representative of software development in general.
Or the opposite. Most people become too lazy to think and let the AI do it for them... and so the AIs can never overcome their baked in biases, so no real progress will happen.
And about what we have got wrong, I think the problem is mostly how we (the average human) lives.
"This place is best shunned and left uninhabited" isn't a useful thing to write, but it's a useful sentiment to evoke for this purpose. Construction of deliberately hostile landscapes was one potential implementation. If I can live anywhere, why would I choose to live on the vast, too hot, practically indestructible black rock the ancients have inexplicably built here ?
One of the potential options for this project was very brutal. Just deliberately leave the surface of the site slightly radioactive. People who try to live there will discover they get cancer and die, it doesn't matter whether they go "Oh, it's radioactive here, that's not good" or "The ancient curse, don't live there because the Ancients have cursed that place" it has the same functional effect which is they stop living there and don't return.
The idea of poisoning the perimeter a radioactive site with radiation is similarly bizarre. If there's been some kind of catastrophic "fall of man" then we may as well leave them to it. If they're approaching our level, then their (reinvented) Geiger counters will tell them what they need to know.
The most sensible way to deal with the waste, after burning up transuranic waste in nuclear reactors (common sense), is to put it somewhere that the effort to find and retrieve it is so great that only people who already knew what they were doing could manage to get their hands on it. The most obvious candidates for such a method are dumping it into the ocean. If you want to get fancy it could first be dissolved into water, or instead vitrified and sealed. Either way, it could be placed directly on the sea floor in deep parts of the ocean, or dropped into subduction zones, or buried beneath the sea floor. Any of these would be adequate. Another option is horizontal boreholes a few kilometers deep, but that's a bit less practical.
Of course people today lose their lids at the thought of a little tritium getting dumped into the ocean; this is the result of the same sort fear mongering campaigns that "this is not a place of honor" comes from. But this is a sociological problem deliberately created by activists, not a technological problem. A great deal of nuclear waste, including spent fuel and reactor components, was dumped into the ocean in the 20th century and nobody crying about Japan's tritium loses much sleep over that waste. China pretends that Japan's tritium will ruin fish for China, but they're not acting concerned about the several hundred TBq of nuclear waste the Soviet Union dumped into the Sea of Japan. Their objections to Japan dumping their tritium are political theater. The impact this oceanic dumping has had since it was done decades ago can be studied, and the answer is that it's not an issue. Water is a really great shielding material and very deep water is really good at keeping meddling idiots away from things. Much better than any spooky monument or deliberately poisoned land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
I don't see what the major issue is with burying radioactive waste inside a mountain and then dynamiting and sealing the entrance so it can't be accessed without serious excavation machinery. (Finland is doing this). Uranium is naturally occurring, we've just condensed it a bit. The civilisation that encounters it would need decent technology to dig it up, and if they've gone backward to the point they don't then not much semiology is going to reach them.
We also have a reasonable grasp of some of the meaning and motivations inherent in rock art from Aboriginal cultures and Lascaux. Much of that is 10,20,30 thousand years old. Communicating at that distance isn't some impossible task of semiology, but the more one tries to abstract a message into symbolic meaning, the greater the chance of it being misunderstood which is why I'd stand by my point of writing it in English and other languages to give a key. Could carve it into granite alongside a well-rendered image of humans dying and in pain. Humans are pretty smart particularly when determined to understand something. If they're completely illiterate it might even inspire them to realise that language can be encoded as symbols, but I don't know what would have to come about whereby we'd lose that ability now. And if it's got that bad, then a mountain full of uranium is going to be the least of their problems.