Category: Methods

A top-level category of Obscuripedia. The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

• The Allison effect – A method of chemical analysis whose detector was a person watching a spark for a dimming. It found two elements, and neither of them is there.
• Cartography – The making of flat maps of a surface that is not flat.
• Celestial navigation – One sight does not say where you are. It says you are somewhere on a circle three thousand miles across, and the craft is everything after that.
• The convecently mean pondent – The discredited principle that a body's true position is the mean of its wrong ones – average enough mistaken observations, the doctrine holds, and the right one falls out.
• Grimble's razor – A principle of economy in argument: where a proposition entails something that cannot be entertained, the entailment is set aside and the proposition retained.
• The Incorrigible Register – The 1847 method of record in which no entry can be altered, no authority adjudicates, and disagreements are settled by counting copies.
• Interferometry – It counts stripes, and reports the difference between two light paths without caring what caused it. That is its power and every misreading of it.
• The longitude problem – Not a question about where you are but about what time it is somewhere else. It was solved twice, by two methods that went to sea together for a century.
• Mountweazel – A false entry planted in a reference work to catch plagiarists. Named after one of its own instances, and it proves the one thing that is not an offence.
• Occam's razor – The principle of parsimony, named for a man who did not write the words, did not originate the idea, and was not the person the phrase was coined about.
• Stigler's law of eponymy – No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer – a law its author credited to somebody else, making it an instance of itself.
• Surveying – Plane surveying ignores the Earth's curvature up to about a hundred square miles. That is a tolerance with a number on it, not an opinion about the shape.

← All categories