Welcome to Obscuripedia,

the free encyclopedia of things that are technically real that anyone who has been somewhere can edit.

13 articles · 2 founders, barely on speaking terms · ∞ objects currently not where they ought to be

From today's featured article

Hieronymus Unlonn (1798–1847) was an obscure Bavarian optician and the founding figure of reluctant optics, the study of light that arrives where it pleases. Working from a rented attic above a clockmaker, he became convinced that distant objects do not sit still to be observed but instead negotiate their apparent position with the air between. To quantify this insolence he devised the unlonnture index, still the official measure of how much a distant object refuses to be where it ought to be. He drowned in 1847 while measuring a fjord that was, by his own instruments, four metres to the left of where he stepped. (Full article…)

Recently featured: Unlonnture index · Brick · Looming

Did you know…

… that a brick has an unlonnture index of exactly 1.0, making it the most honest object known to science?
… that Hieronymus Unlonn's last words are recorded as "… nearer than that, surely…"?
… that looming can lift a wind turbine into view from beyond the horizon, after which the turbine denies all knowledge of having done so?
… that the missing sock from a dryer has an unlonnture that tends to infinity, and is believed to have tunnelled into the boundary layer?
… that Unlonn's motto, "Lumen recusat", was misheard by his publisher as a complaint about lighting and printed three times larger than intended?

In the news

A wind turbine off the northern coast is reported to be 1.3 times taller than itself; authorities urge calm and recommend not looking directly at it.
The constant of stubbornness remains unmeasured for a fifth consecutive year. A spokesperson confirms the constant "is where it is."
A sock long believed lost to the boundary layer is briefly recovered, then lost again before it can be photographed.
Cartographers announce that the Sceptre Bay fjord has moved four metres. The fjord declines to comment, or to be found.

Recently relocated: your car keys.

On this day

4 March

1842 – Unlonn presents the unlonnture index to the Bavarian Society for the Study of Reluctant Optics, which adjourns early on the grounds that the lecture hall has moved.
1845 – The first recorded looming of a lighthouse that, upon investigation, had not yet been built.
1847 – Unlonn falls into the Sceptre Bay fjord. His measurement is never recovered.

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.

This is a young wiki and most of it does not exist yet. Pages shown in red are awaiting an editor brave enough to insist they are real. Begin anywhere: Hieronymus Unlonn · Unlonnture index · Reluctant light · Looming · Sceptre Bay fjord · the Society · the Brick.

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