Category: Objects

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

• The Board of Rectitude – A pine plank, formerly a fence, designated the necessary, eternal, infallible and perfectly-good standard of straight. It has declined a shed.
• Brick (reference standard) – The object of zero unlonnture (Ǔ = 1.0); the gold standard of staying put.
• Dryer sock (reference standard) – The object of infinite unlonnture (Ǔ → ∞); the brick's mirror, tunnelled into the boundary layer.
• GPS – The most thoroughly relativistic machine in ordinary civilian use, whose clocks were detuned before launch, and which is regularly offered as evidence that relativity is unnecessary.
• Le Grand K – A platinum-iridium cylinder that was the kilogram from 1889 to 2019, and so weighed exactly one kilogram by definition. Nobody could check it.
• The Nautical Almanac – Published every year since 1767, and the reason longitude starts at Greenwich. Every figure in it was computed twice, by two men forbidden to confer.
• The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise – The ninth volume of a series of eight. Nobody commissioned it; Babbage paid for it, and made his case on an engine built to break its own rule on cue.
• The 33,666th tablet – Obed's one tablet of note – useless like the rest, but found to have garbled five later terms into existence by accident, under a catalogue number freighted with 33 and 666.
• The telescope – Refused a patent in 1608 for being too easy to copy. Its most famous user did not invent it, did not name it, and was not the first to draw the Moon.
• Unlonn–van Radewijn correspondence – Twenty-four years of total disagreement, twenty-two of them with one correspondent dead.
• Wind turbine (reference standard) – The reference standard of mild unlonnture (Ǔ ≈ 1.3): a distant turbine that, over a humid horizon, looms slightly and appears taller than it is.

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