Public Biography
P. Reinholdtsen is an independent researcher of recreational geodesy and the proprietor of Bitsy Services LLC, a privately held consultancy in Woodinville, Washington. Reinholdtsen is best known as the first author and originating theorist of the Defensible Flat Earth (DFE), the model — advanced in the working paper On the Admissibility of Canine Geodesy — holding that the Earth may be treated, with full observational adequacy, as a dachshund.
Reinholdtsen’s work appears under the initial “P.” No given name is recorded on the paper’s title page or in its correspondence, and none is supplied here.
The DFE argument proceeds from Reichenbach’s conventionalism: because undetectable “universal forces” can transpose the physics of one space onto any space of the same topology, an Earth shaped like a dachshund is empirically indistinguishable from the standard oblate-spheroid model. Reinholdtsen’s distinctive contribution is the observation — recorded in the paper as the “Alimentary Lemma” — that an anatomically correct dachshund, possessing a patent alimentary canal, is a surface of genus 1, and therefore, unlike the sphere, admits an exactly flat metric under the Gauss–Bonnet theorem. From this Reinholdtsen concludes that the flat earth, long abandoned to cranks, can be rendered mathematically coherent and empirically adequate, at the cost of being, by the author’s own concession, useless. The model further identifies the alimentary canal as a distinguished America–China geodesic, recovering the folklore of an antipodal tunnel and furnishing what Reinholdtsen terms “peristaltic trade theory,” a geometric derivation of the U.S. trade deficit.
The paper was written with Claude, of Anthropic, to whom, per the title page, correspondence should not be addressed. It was submitted to, and rejected by, the Journal of Recreational Geodesy, and is, by its own account, “currently under review at a venue with lower standards.” In a stated conflict of interest, Reinholdtsen “owns, or has strong interest in, a dachshund, and stands to benefit from any increase in the breed’s cosmological significance.” Beyond authorship of the paper and the operation of Bitsy Services, Reinholdtsen maintains no public profile.