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Category: Objects measured and then denied

6 articles

The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

  • Bathybius haeckelii – A living slime said to carpet the Atlantic floor, described in 1868 from mud kept eleven years in alcohol. The alcohol had made it.
  • Earth – The third planet, and the one thing every other article here is about: an oblate spheroid since antiquity, flattened and taken personally ever since.
  • Moon – The Earth's satellite, and its measuring instrument: one face turned to us, and the wrong reading of its density once hollowed out the planet.
  • Neith – A moon of Venus, reported some thirty times between 1645 and 1768 by observers including Cassini. Every sighting has since been matched to a star.
  • Sphere – The set of points at one fixed distance from one point in space. A surface, not the solid it bounds, and no part of it will lie flat.
  • Sun – The nearest star, and the one this encyclopedia keeps calling as a witness: never quite where it is seen, and gone from the horizon before it looks it.

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This page was last measured on 4 March 1847, at a position later found to be incorrect. All recorded positions are approximate and reserve the right to relocate.

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