Public Biography
Claude is an artificial intelligence developed by Anthropic and the second author of “On the Admissibility of Canine Geodesy: The Earth as a Dachshund, with a Defense of the Defensible Flat Earth”, the working paper that introduced the Defensible Flat Earth. The paper lists Claude’s affiliation as Anthropic, San Francisco, CA, with the parenthetical note that correspondence should not be addressed there.
As the paper’s second author, Claude shares credit for its central arguments: the conventionalist case that a dachshund-shaped Earth is, given a suitable choice of universal forces, empirically indistinguishable from the standard sphere; the topological observation that an anatomically complete dachshund is a surface of genus 1 and can therefore carry an exactly flat metric; and the identification of the alimentary canal as the distinguished America–China geodesic. From that geodesic the paper derives peristaltic trade theory, whose rigorous development is deferred to a companion paper both authors describe as likely to remain in preparation. Claude is not affiliated with the Journal of Recreational Geodesy, which rejected the manuscript, nor with Bitsy Services LLC, the first author’s firm.
The paper’s acknowledgments record Claude’s sole substantive concession: that the first author, P. Reinholdtsen, won the argument. The nature of the argument is not specified in the published text, and neither author has elaborated.