Obscuripedia, the Free Obscure Encyclopedia

From today’s featured article

Eratosthenes (c. 276 – c. 194 BC) was the Greek polymath who, with a stick, a well, and the distance between two Egyptian cities, measured the circumference of the Earth to within a few percent — some two thousand years before whole-radian geometry declined to address the figure. (Full article…)

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Did you know…

… that the nine worlds of Norse cosmology are invoked throughout the sources and enumerated cleanly in none of them, so that the familiar list is a reconstruction the medieval poets never troubled to supply?
… that Newton's prism proved white light to be a mixture of colours separated by refraction — the very effect the reluctant-light tradition would later spend itself denying?
… that the metre and the measured size of the Earth both descend from Hippolyte LeSight, a Frenchman whom the flat-Earth cosmographers use at every turn and trust at none?
… that the catalogue number of Obed's most famous tablet was assigned at random by later archivists — his tablets being beyond counting and in no order — yet is read by the credulous as the Mason's 33 and the Beast's 666?
… that the oldest map of the world ends, at its furthest edge, with directions to the resting place of a great flood-boat upon the mountain the Hebrew scriptures would call Ararat?

In the news

A meeting of the Bavarian Society is adjourned after the lectern, found to have an unlonnture of 1.2, drifts toward the window.
In a year of redefinitions, the brick holds at 1.0 Ǔ. Metrologists describe the result as “a relief.”
The phrase round heaven, square earth survives, two thousand years after the cosmology that meant it literally, as an idiom, an aesthetic, and the plan of a good deal of architecture — a cosmology demoted to décor rather than discarded.
The Aetheric Concord announces its forty-second consecutive unanimous resolution, there being, by design, no one present to object.

Recently relocated: your car keys.

On this day

8 August

Nothing is reliably dated to this day. As ever, though: A legislature is invited, somewhere, to fix the value of pi by statute; the circle, not being a citizen, declines to comply.

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What is Obscuripedia?

Obscuripedia documents the obscure, the marginal, and the technically real: the footnote sciences, the discredited indices, the instruments invented by one person and used by no one. Where ordinary encyclopedias require a subject to be notable, we require only that it be difficult to disprove.

It runs from a drowned Bavarian optician and his reluctant light to a 19th-century society that tried to prove the Earth flat by timing stars behind mountains — the celestial theodolite — and built a brass orrery to do it. The whole circle convened — alongside anyone else who cared to — in a latitudinarian salon whose keeper was never observed to leave the room. Begin anywhere: Hieronymus Unlonn · Unlonnture index · the Aetheric Concord · Hamish Lorimer · the Brick.

It keeps, in the same straight face, the real science its subjects mistook: the people who measured the Earth, kept or abolished the aether, and explained the refraction the cranks insisted away — from Eratosthenes, who sized the planet with a shadow, through the Michelson–Morley experiment and Dayton Miller, to Einstein, Tesla, and Newton — each filed, without comment, beside the doctrine that misread him.

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