Thursday Things: Dreams So Real Edition
4 June 2020. Vol 2 No 23 By Dan McGirt. #43
Welcome to Thursday Things. This week our loose theme is based on dreams and flights of fancy.
Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash
I can relate to this and have been known to zone out into the dream world, but not quite to this degree: What It’s Like When Your Daydreams Are Just As Real As Life. The article discusses a condition called “maladaptive daydreaming” which is “a disorder where people spend about 60 percent of their waking life in a self-designed imaginary world. … Those who suffer from it know this world is fantasy, and still manage to retain contact with the “real world,” but in extreme cases “extensive fantasy activity replaces human interaction and/or interferes with academic, interpersonal or vocational functioning.” Most of the article is a fascinating interview with a maladaptive dreamer who was the subject of an extensive case study.
And some of us become fiction writers instead…
Or we combine our daydreaming with maps. Glorious maps! We’ve featured maps and map collections more than once on Thursday Things. And will again. Here is this week’s entry: “Atlas Obscura recently asked Mode, Edney, and other collectors and curators to share some maps that might distract and delight you, wherever you are.”
Playland," Rye Beach : Westchester County Park System, Westchester County, New York
Did you ever dream of being a Jedi Knight? Or a galactic bounty hunter? The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the three Star Wars movies that I officially recognize and the “bounty hunter scene” is a classic. This SyFy article discusses the outsized impact of that brief scene on the overall Star Wars universe:
In just a hair over 45 seconds, the film establishes an archetype within its universe, propels the plot forward, and introduces the man who will become one of the all-time great icons of the Star Wars saga in Boba Fett. Its efficiency in conveying information paired with the immediate allure of the characters it introduces makes for a scene that captures everything that has made the world of Star Wars so alluring for over 40 years now.
This would be a dream come true for some. Scientists discover the “skinny gene” at last? Scientists from Austria, Canada, and Estonia say that lower, or deficient, levels of the gene Anaplastic Lymphoma Kinase (ALK) are significantly linked to skinniness and bodily resistance to weight gain. … To test their theory that diminished levels of ALK are responsible for genetic skinniness, the research team performed an experiment in which they “deactivated” the ALK genes in a group of mice. To the researchers’ surprise, those mice immediately became skinnier despite continuing with the same diets and activity levels.” Get the full skinny on all the scientific details in Cell. It’s a long way from mice to people, but this seems like a weighty discovery that could lead to useful therapies for weight gain down the line.
While I am not entirely sure what one does with a vortex laser, I am certain I need one. Because vortex and laser together has to be awesome! Vortex Lasers May Be a Boon for Data: Twisted light beams could boost telecommunications data rates—
Vortex lasers could help photons carry more data, a new study finds. … A beam of light that carries orbital angular momentum resembles a vortex, moving through space with a spiraling pattern like a corkscrew. Whereas a conventional light beam is brightest at its center, vortex beams have ringlike shapes that are dark in the center, due to how some of the waves making up vortex beams can interfere with one another.
A potentially extraordinarily useful property of vortex beams is that they do not interfere with each other if they all possess different twisting patterns. This means a theoretically infinite number of vortex beams can get overlaid on top of each other to carry an unlimited number of data streams at the same time.
Get much more information at the link and the full technical details in two articles the May issue of Science:
That should give you more than enough light reading for this week…
Pretty sure this has nothing to do with vortex lasers. But it’s pretty. Photo by Jack B on Unsplash
May all your dreams be bright. Thank you for reading Thursday Things. See you next Thursday!
