Science: Painless Expansion

The earth is round, all right—but not round like a bourgeois ball; it has a more complicated, more Russian shape. So a Soviet scientist announced recently. Since 1940, said Professor Alexander Alexandrovich Izotov, he and fellow Russian geodesists have painstakingly remeasured significant areas of the earth. Their measurements make expanding Russia bigger than ever.

The Moscow men determined that:

1) the earth's equator is not a perfect circle, as long supposed, but an ellipse;

2) the global area is about 125,000 square kilometers (47,500 square miles) larger than previously reckoned; 3) the Soviet...