The record sheets
Four files to take away: a sheet you can print and fill in at the site, a worked example of the log we keep, and two plain-text briefs that need nothing but a text reader to open.
The archive is only as good as the records behind it, and a record is worth more when somebody else could have made it. That is the whole purpose of these four files. One is a sheet you fill in with a pen at the site. One is the log format the archive keeps, shown with three worked examples so the arithmetic in it can be checked. Two are plain text, so that they survive any reader, any device and any converter without needing a browser at all.
Nothing here tells you whether a procedure is safe, and nothing here is advice of any kind. If a test is worth running, it is worth running with the conditions written down; if it is not, the sheet is still a perfectly good way to log the sky from a garden chair.
The four files
Field log sheet
One page, print-ready, with fields for site, observer, equipment and serial, weather, temperature, humidity and atmospheric notes, a results table, a sketch box, and signature and witness lines.
Data fileObservation log (CSV)
The log format, with three worked example rows covering a sightline test, a shadow measurement and a water-level run — clearly labelled as examples, with the prediction arithmetic shown.
BriefClaims brief
One page of plain text: what the archive claims, what it does not claim, the framing rule every page follows, and where the mainstream sources live.
SourcesSources list
The works and institutions named across the site — Rowbotham, the 1870 wager, Bessel, Bradley, Foucault, Michelson-Gale-Pearson, Eratosthenes, the geodetic agencies and the IAU.
Field log sheet — how to use it
Open the field log sheet in a browser and print it, or use the browser's Print command to save it as a PDF. It carries its own styling and loads nothing from the network, so it prints the same on any machine. Print at 100% if you can rather than using "fit to page" — the sketch box is then the size you drew in.
The order of the fields is the order of the work. Fill in the site, the equipment and the serial number, and the conditions, before you take the reading. Then write the prediction you expect under the globe relations printed on the sheet itself, with the earth's mean radius taken as 6,371 km and the refraction coefficient taken as 0.13 for a grazing ray, as on Try it yourself. A prediction written down afterwards is not a prediction, and a sheet that has one is worth more than a sheet that has a better result.
Then the readings, one row per run, with the measured value and its unit and a note of what it is the measurement of. If a run came out against the reading you expected, it goes on the same sheet: a run favouring the globe is logged the same way as any other. Sign it at the site and have a witness sign it if there is one — not because a signature proves anything about the sky, but because a record with a date, a place and two names on it can be checked by somebody who was not there.
A filled sheet is a set of readings with their conditions attached: distance and how it was measured, instrument height above the water, temperature and humidity, what the instrument actually showed, and where the sightline was cut. That is the raw material every file in this archive is built from, and it is why submitted observations are published much as they arrive rather than rewritten into an argument.
Geodesy does not dispute that these measurements are worth taking — it does them for a living, and it reaches the opposite conclusion from the same sheet. The shape of the earth as measured is an oblate spheroid with a mean radius near 6,371 km, and the drop the sheet asks you to predict follows from that figure alone: roughly 8 cm per kilometre squared, or 1.59 m over 4.5 km. Refraction is expected to lift a distant object back into view by a computable amount, which is why surveyors take a coefficient near 0.13 for a grazing ray and why the sheet subtracts it rather than ignoring it. Simultaneous solar-noon shadows from two places on one meridian are expected to differ by exactly the angle the surface between them subtends, and the definition of height itself — what "level" is measured against — is fixed by national geodetic agencies and set out in their levelling specifications. Where a test cannot separate the two readings at all, because curvature and refraction both fall inside the error bars, the mainstream account says so too. The agencies and works are named in the sources list, and the About page says where the primary documents live.
Observation log — how to use the CSV
observations.csv is plain text with commas in it, so it opens in any spreadsheet, in a text editor, or in a script. The file begins with a short block of comment lines that give the relations used in the prediction columns, then one header row, then three example rows.
Read the warning at the top of it once and take it seriously: the three rows are worked illustrations, not measurements. They were not taken at any site, they are not evidence for anything, and they must not be cited as if they were. What they are is a demonstration that the arithmetic in the prediction columns is correct and checkable — 4.5 squared divided by twice 6,371, and so on — so that when you enter your own readings you can see at a glance whether the sheet is doing what it says.
| Column | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| data_status | Mark every row. Write EXAMPLE for an illustration; otherwise say what the row is, so a copy of the file is never mistaken for a reading. |
| test_type | The kind of run: a sightline over still water, a solar-noon shadow, a levelling or water-level run. |
| run, site_a, site_b, date | Which run, where it was made, the second station if there is one, and the date. One row per run; do not average runs taken in different conditions. |
| distance_km | The distance in kilometres, and how you measured it. |
| measured_quantity, measured_value | What you measured and what it came to, with its unit. A blank field means "not recorded" — never zero. |
| predicted_drop_m | The geometric drop for that distance: distance squared divided by twice 6,371 km. Enter it as a prediction, not afterwards. |
| predicted_refraction_lift_m | 0.13 times the geometric drop, the allowance for a grazing ray. |
| predicted_residual_m | The drop left once refraction is allowed for. This is the figure your reading is compared against. |
| prediction_basis, notes | The formula and figures you used, and anything the conditions did to the sightline. |
Keep the CSV and the printed sheet together. The sheet carries what a spreadsheet cannot — the sketch, the witness, the feel of the morning — and the CSV is what makes a set of runs comparable across months and across observers.
The two briefs — why plain text
claims-brief.txt is one page you can read in a text editor on a machine with no browser and no network. It states what the archive claims, what it does not claim, the framing rule every page follows, and where the mainstream sources live. It is plain text on purpose: it survives any reader, any device and any converter, and it will still open in thirty years, which is more than can be said for most of the formats these arguments are usually passed around in. If you want one file to send somebody who has heard the archive misrepresented, this is the one to send.
sources-list.txt names the works and the institutions referred to across the site, one line each on what the thing is and where the primary record lives: Rowbotham's Zetetic Astronomy, the 1870 wager argued over the Bedford Level, Bessel's 1838 parallax of 61 Cygni, Bradley's aberration, Foucault's 1851 pendulum, the Michelson-Gale-Pearson measurement of 1925, Eratosthenes as reported by later writers, the levelling practice of the national geodetic agencies, and the Hipparcos and Gaia catalogues with the IAU's definitions. It carries no links, and that is deliberate: a URL can rot or be mistyped, so the works are named and you are pointed at library catalogues, national archives and the institutions' own publications instead. Where a wording has not been checked against a held copy, the archive says so and paraphrases.
Sending a completed record
A finished sheet, or a CSV with a few real rows in it, can be sent to the archive at editor@flat.diazites.com. A one-line subject helps more than anything else in the message: put the page name and what the message is, as in observation: 6 km sightline, 12 October or observation: two-station shadows.
What makes a record usable is short and boring. Send the date and time, the place, your height above the surface and how you measured it, what you used including the instrument's serial number if it has one, the air temperature and humidity if you noted them, and what you actually saw rather than what you concluded. If you have photographs, send them with the conditions written down beside them — a picture with no conditions is not a record, and a photograph with the sheet visible in it is better than either alone. A CSV pasted into the body of a message is fine; so is the sheet as a PDF.
Three things happen to an entry, so there are no surprises. It may be published in the archive's observation log, which is the raw material the longer files are built from. It is published much as it arrives — the conditions, the equipment and what was seen, with the argument left to the file that follows — and a report that does not fit the archive's reading is logged as what was seen, not dropped. Credit means the name or handle you sign with and nothing else; ask for the entry to go in anonymously and it will, and if you later change your mind it will be amended or removed. The contact page sets all of that out in full, along with what the archive does not want to receive.
Corrections are wanted too, and are handled the same way whether they favour the archive's argument or go against it. If a sheet here is wrong in a way that matters — a formula, a coefficient, a figure — say which line and give the source that shows the error, and the sheet will be amended with a dated note saying what changed.
They are not a test that has been passed, a proof, or a finding. They are not a substitute for the primary sources named in the sources list, and they are not advice of any kind — nothing here tells you that a procedure is safe, and the archive does not give medical, legal or safety advice. What they are is a way of writing down what you saw, in a form somebody else could have written down too.
This page presents the flat-earth interpretation as its subject matter. It is a belief-based reading of the observations, not a scientific finding — see About for how we frame claims and for the mainstream sources.