The Blind Spot opens with the words: "Perhaps it were just as well to start at the beginning. A mere matter of news." Suppose I use them in the same sense:
A mere matter of news: The first instalment of this fabulous novel was featured in Argosy-All-Story-Weekly for May 14, 1921. Described as a "different" serial, it was introduced by a cover by Modest Stein. In the foreground was the profile of a girl of another dimension--ethereal, sensuous, the eternal feminine--the Nervina of the story. Filmy crystalline earrings swept back over her bare shoulders. Dominating the background was a huge flaming yellow ball, like our Sun as seen from the hypothetical Vulcan-- splotched with murky, mysterious globii vitonae. There was an ancient quay, and emerging from the ultramarine waters about it a silhouetted metropolis of spires, domes, and minarets. It was 1921, and that generation thus received its first glimpse of the alien landscape of The Blind Spot and the baroque beauty of an immortal woman of fantasy fiction.
The authors? Homer Eon Flint was already a reigning favourite with post-World-War-I enthusiasts of imaginative literature, who had eagerly devoured his QUEEN OF LIFE and LORD OF DEATH, his KING OF CONSERVE ISLAND and THE PLANETEER. Austin Hall was well known and popular for his ALMOST IMMORTAL, REBEL SOUL, and INTO THE INFINITE.
Then came this epoch-making collaboration. When Mary Gnaedinger launched Famous Fantastic Mysteries magazine she early presented THE BLIND SPOT, and printed it again in that magazine's companion Fantastic Novels. These reprints are now collectors' items, almost unobtainable, and otherwise the story has long been out of print. Rumour says an unauthorised German version of THE BLIND SPOT, has been published in book form. There is another book called THE BLIND SPOT, and also a magazine story, and a major movie studio was to produce a film of the same title. However, here is presented the only hard-cover version of the only BLIND SPOT of consequence to lovers of fantasy. (cont.)
A blue gray horizon loomed outside the window of the plane as it slowly banked and turned toward the airport still miles ahead of us. The plane turned as another glow punctuated the breach between the zodiacal light and the darkness that enveloped the earth below. The glow had the yellow-white tinge of city lights reflected up from a huge urban aggregate of life, power, and activity. As we descended into the dark landscape a long tentacle of lights reached out below, stretching from that still distant aurora. More tentacles appeared below stretching in all directions. Motionless, they laid full the valleys, extended up ridge lines and spilled over crests as if to defy containment. At last the conglomerate of lights radiated below us. We sailed through the sky above it for thirty minutes or more. It was as if we were gazing down at some giant primordial sea creature that had flung itself from the ocean depths and wedged among the rolling hills to await the warming sun of morning.
The sprawl below us was not what I had expected. This was not the emerald forest I had imagined, rather it was a jungle of humanity into which we descended. It was not my preconceived notion of idyllic tribal life with the local witchdoctor to show us his healing gifts. It was a world of urban shamans. Not the chic metropolitan healers suggested by the cover of Gabrielle Roth's book titled The Urban Shaman, but the world of healers as they live and serve in the poor favillas of populous Brazilian cities. The plane dropped onto the tarmac and taxied to its assigned port and thus began a journey into magical time, a reverie, a journey in Brazil. (cont.)
OVERVIEWTHE EXPONENTIAL PLANETARY FRAMEWORK: METHODOLOGY AND DATA
Bode's Flaw Bode's "Law" - more correctly the Titius-Bode relationship - was an ad hoc scheme for approximating mean planetary distances that was originated by Johann Titius in 1866 and popularized by Johann Bode in 1871. The " law " later failed in the cases of the outermost planets Neptune and Pluto, but it was flawed from the outset with respect to distances of both MERCURY and EARTH, as Titius was perhaps aware.II The Alternative Describes an alternative approach to the structure of the Solar System that employs logarithmic data, orbital velocity, synodic motion, and mean planetary periods in contrast to ad hoc methodology and the use of mean heliocentric distances alone.III The Exponential Order The constant of linearity for the resulting planetary framework is the ubiquitous constant Phi known since antiquity. Major departures from the theoretical norm are the ASTEROID BELT, NEPTUNE, and EARTH in a resonant synodic position between VENUS and MARS.
THE SPIRAL FORM AND UBIQUITOUS GOLDEN SECTION
IV Spira Solaris Archytas-Mirabilis Most suitably represented in terms of exponential growth and a complex equiangular spiral, the Phi-series based planetary model appears to be new in one sense and yet quite ancient in another. Title graphic (91 kb, best viewed at 1280 x 1024 resolution).IVd2 Spira Solaris and The Middle Ages Ostensively the translation of Aristotle's De Caelo from medieval latin to French, Nicole Oresme's Le Livre du ciel et du monde [ ca.1375 CE] was more than a translation and a commentary. The numerous references in this work to the insights of the Arab scholar Ibn Rushd [Averroes,1128-1198 CE] lead back to Plato's Republic, Archimedes, Pythagoras, and the Golden Section in early Alchemical contexts. (cont.)
ASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is providing important supporting evidence for the existence of a candidate planetary companion to a relatively bright young brown dwarf star located 225 light-years away in the southern constellation Hydra.
Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile detected the planet candidate in April 2004. They used infrared observations and adaptive optics to sharpen their view. The VLT astronomers spotted a faint companion object to the brown dwarf star 2MASSWJ 1207334-393254 (also known as 2M1207). The object is a candidate planet, because it is only one-hundredth the brightness of the brown dwarf (at the longer-than-Hubble wavelengths observed with the VLT). It glimmers at barely 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, which is cooler than a light bulb filament.
Is This Speck of Light an Exoplanet ? Caption: ESO PR Photo 26a/04 is a composite image of the brown dwarf object 2M1207 (centre) and the fainter object seen near it, at an angular distance of 778 milliarcsec. Designated "Giant Planet Candidate Companion" by the discoverers, it may represent the first image of an exoplanet. Further observations, in particular of its motion in the sky relative to 2M1207 are needed to ascertain its true nature. The photo is based on three near-infrared exposures (in the H, K and L' wavebands) with the NACO adaptive-optics facility at the 8.2-m VLT Yepun telescope at the ESO Paranal Observatory.
Since an extrasolar planet has never been directly imaged, this remarkable observation required Hubble's unique abilities to do follow-up observations to test and validate if it is indeed a planet. Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) camera conducted complementary observations taken at shorter infrared wavelength observations unobtainable from the ground. This wavelength coverage is important, because it is needed to characterize the object's physical nature.
Very high precision measurements of the relative position between the dwarf and companion were obtained with NICMOS in August 2004. The unique HST follow up observations were compared to the earlier VLT observations to determine if the two objects are really gravitationally bound and hence move across the sky together. Astronomers said they can almost rule out the probability the suspected planet is really a background object, since there was no noticeable change in its position relative to the dwarf. (cont.)
How do you weigh a supermassive black hole? Simply follow any surrounding clumps of matter as they circle towards their doom.
Astronomers using this technique have come up with the most accurate mass measurement so far for one such monster, which turns out to be more than 300,000 times as massive as our Sun.
"This is the first time we've been able to measure a complete orbital period for something close to a black hole," says Lance Miller, a team member from the University of Oxford, UK, who presented the results on 10 January at the American Astronomical Society conference in San Diego, California.
"We couldn't even be sure that there were hotspots around black holes before," he says of the hot matter they studied. (cont.)
