This Meme But Its Just Horikashi

South Island, New Zealand

The Squire, Merion

Originally a Twitter Thread, with the help of Thread Reader

Baldolino Calvino🏳️‍🌈🚩🇧🇷✨♻️🌱

Oct 1 • 15 tweets • 4 min read

Fantasy is not science, nor philosophy, and not real (of course). This may seem obvious, but what I am trying to do is creating an exact, non-contradictory definition of fantasy, not as an art genre, but as an object of study. Not by science, but by fantastic natural history.

Fantasy - Wikipedia

"Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction involving magical elements, typically set in a fictional universe and sometimes inspired by mythology and folklore."

Fantasy, Magic (not meaning prestidigitation), Mythology, and Folklore can be understood as equivalent, overlaping concepts. Wikipedia's entry is mostly tautological, circular, thus.

However, this is an article about the artistic genre, and one could say that it refers to art expression (written, musical, cinematic, other) that uses these references. This is enough for this use case, but we do not advance in an objective conceptualization of fantasy.

Fantasy (psychology) - Wikipedia

"(...) fantasy is a broad range of mental experiences, mediated by the faculty of imagination in the human brain, and marked by an expression of certain desires through vivid mental imagery."

This entry about the concept of fantasy in psychology gives a more elaborared view of it. However, what differentiates fantasy from other instances of human creativjty? The article continues: "Fantasies are associated with scenarios that are absolutely impossible."

Wikipedia's entry on Fantasy (psychology) does not give any reference to this concept, and proceeds listing the importance of Fantasy for various theoretical approaches (Freud, Klein, Lacan), or pathologies (narcissistic personality disorder, schizophrenia). It is not unified.

More revealing is Wikipedia's "History of Fantasy" (about the literary genre).

" (...) the supernatural and the fantastic were an element of literature from its beginning. The modern genre is distinguished from tales and folklore (...)"

It makes a clear distintion between ancient myths and folklore, and so-called "modern fantasy", whose first explicit representant was Scottish author George MacDonald in the late XIX century, with his novels "The Princess and the Goblin" and "Phantastes".

Important precursors were Dickens, Thackeray, Andersen, Ruskin, Morris. And MacDonald's work enormously influenced Tolkien and Lewis. One key word in this historic description of Fantasy is "speculative". And a defining characteristic of modern fantasy is the "fantasy world".

Distinctive differences of modern fantasy are the postulate of a secondary fantasy world apart from reality; fictitious by design; and narratives from a (group of) author(s) with an interpretative aim. Myths or folklore does not have any of these characteristics.

The entry goes on in a detailed description of the development of Fantasy as a literary genre, since writings about tales and legends from Middle Ages. However, one fun example of how medieval mind understood the fantastic can be seen in the novel "Baudolino" by Umberto Eco.

Most of this Wikipedia's entry is based upon https://twitter.com/john_clute and John Grant's https://sf-encyclopedia.com/fe/, published in 1997, and fully available on the internet.

More to come, be patient.

HiPOD: A Layered Feature in a Crater in Nilosyrtis Mensae

The objective of this observation is to examine a layered feature in an impact crater. The layers may represent layers of mantle from when the climate changed and the shape may be due to the wind. The scene is also found in Context Camera data. (Enhanced color cutout is less than 1 km across; black and white is less than 5 km.)

ID: ESP_075257_2155 date: 16 August 2022 altitude: 291 km

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona

Lilith by AetherionArtOG

Navigating Deep Space by Starlight

On August 6, 1967, astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell noticed a blip in her radio telescope data. And then another. Eventually, Bell Burnell figured out that these blips, or pulses, were not from people or machines.

The blips were constant. There was something in space that was pulsing in a regular pattern, and Bell Burnell figured out that it was a pulsar: a rapidly spinning neutron star emitting beams of light. Neutron stars are superdense objects created when a massive star dies. Not only are they dense, but neutron stars can also spin really fast! Every star we observe spins, and due to a property called angular momentum, as a collapsing star gets smaller and denser, it spins faster. It’s like how ice skaters spin faster as they bring their arms closer to their bodies and make the space that they take up smaller.

The pulses of light coming from these whirling stars are like the beacons spinning at the tops of lighthouses that help sailors safely approach the shore. As the pulsar spins, beams of radio waves (and other types of light) are swept out into the universe with each turn. The light appears and disappears from our view each time the star rotates.

After decades of studying pulsars, astronomers wondered—could they serve as cosmic beacons to help future space explorers navigate the universe? To see if it could work, scientists needed to do some testing!

First, it was important to gather more data. NASA’s NICER, or Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer, is a telescope that was installed aboard the International Space Station in 2017. Its goal is to find out things about neutron stars like their sizes and densities, using an array of 56 special X-ray concentrators and sensitive detectors to capture and measure pulsars’ light.

But how can we use these X-ray pulses as navigational tools? Enter SEXTANT, or Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology. If NICER was your phone, SEXTANT would be like an app on it.  

During the first few years of NICER’s observations, SEXTANT created an on-board navigation system using NICER’s pulsar data. It worked by measuring the consistent timing between each pulsar’s pulses to map a set of cosmic beacons.

When calculating position or location, extremely accurate timekeeping is essential. We usually rely on atomic clocks, which use the predictable fluctuations of atoms to tick away the seconds. These atomic clocks can be located on the ground or in space, like the ones on GPS satellites. However, our GPS system only works on or close to Earth, and onboard atomic clocks can be expensive and heavy. Using pulsar observations instead could give us free and reliable “clocks” for navigation. During its experiment, SEXTANT was able to successfully determine the space station’s orbital position!

We can calculate distances using the time taken for a signal to travel between two objects to determine a spacecraft’s approximate location relative to those objects. However, we would need to observe more pulsars to pinpoint a more exact location of a spacecraft. As SEXTANT gathered signals from multiple pulsars, it could more accurately derive its position in space.

So, imagine you are an astronaut on a lengthy journey to the outer solar system. You could use the technology developed by SEXTANT to help plot your course. Since pulsars are reliable and consistent in their spins, you wouldn’t need Wi-Fi or cell service to figure out where you were in relation to your destination. The pulsar-based navigation data could even help you figure out your ETA!

None of these missions or experiments would be possible without Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s keen eye for an odd spot in her radio data decades ago, which set the stage for the idea to use spinning neutron stars as a celestial GPS. Her contribution to the field of astrophysics laid the groundwork for research benefitting the people of the future, who yearn to sail amongst the stars.  

Keep up with the latest NICER news by following NASA Universe on X and Facebook and check out the mission’s website. For more on space navigation, follow @NASASCaN on X or visit NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation website.  

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

Fairy nap

X-Men by Chase Conley

Bye Twitter! Hello, (again) Tumblr! I am back after years!