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[1]

REJ:2026.10.05.0001 quant.LG (Quantum Linguistics) Status: Rejected

Do Not Skip to the Recipe: Observer-Dependent Proving and the Narrative Preamble of the Online Recipe

Wenceslas Adeyemi & Imre Castellanos

Comments: 5 pages, 5 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 7 minutes on Oct 5, 2026.

Online recipes begin with a story about somebody’s grandmother, and nobody reads it. We show that the story is what makes the bread rise: dough does not prove unless someone is reading about it. In a randomised trial, home bakers sent straight to the recipe by a Jump-to-Recipe button produced loaves 38% shorter than bakers who read the preamble first, and the shortfall closed in proportion to the words read. Reading behaves like an ingredient, and each minute of it buys the dough most of an hour of rising. This predicts a law of preamble length, 4.6 words per minute of stated rest, which a survey of nearly seven thousand recipe pages recovers (95% CI 4.3–4.8) after controlling for search-engine keywords. Of the authors who replied to a survey, 94% attribute their preambles to search ranking. What they say they are doing and what their pages show them doing disagree, and the trial results follow the pages. The effect is absent in focaccia, and we do not know why. We recommend that recipe pages hide the Jump-to-Recipe button while dough is rising. Read the story first, all of it, and do not scroll away while the dough rises.
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[47]

REJ:2026.07.23.0001 stat.EZ (Statistics) Rejected

The Phantom Jam Inquest: A Forensic Attribution of Singular Liability in a Provably Authorless Traffic Wave

Wendell A. Fenn

Comments: 16 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 15 minutes on Jul 23, 2026.

Abstract: The traffic stops for no reason. The road is open — no crash, no merge, no police — and yet the cars halt, clear a minute later, and no one is ever held to account. Physics has a name for this event, the phantom jam or jamiton: a stop-and-go wave that forms on its own once traffic grows dense enough, then rolls backward through the cars for as long as it likes. For forty years the field has filed it under emergent, authorless, no one to blame. We regard that as an open case, not a closed one. Treating each jam as a body owed an inquest, we re-analyse 400 spontaneous jams recorded on an instrumented ring road and, for each, establish a time of death, a manner of death, and a proximate cause. Three findings are reported. First, the jam is clinically dead a mean of 8.4 , mathrm s before any driver perceives a slowdown: death precedes symptom. Second, causal responsibility — each car’s fair share of the total delay — is not diffuse but extreme (fleet Gini =0.93 ): a single vehicle, the index driver, carries a median 71 % of it. Third, the modal manner of death is not natural causes but homicide ( 63 % of jams): an unwarranted leap up the Ladder of Inference, from one ambiguous brake light straight to a full-force stop, with no hazard present. The phantom jam has an author. We name them.

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[48]

REJ:2026.07.22.0001 spec.EC (Speculative Economics) Rejected

What Job Is the Audience Hiring the Encore To Do? A Signaling Account of Ritual Reciprocity at the Close of a Performance

Séverine Aldabra & The Interval Study Group

Comments: 8 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 33 minutes on Jul 22, 2026.

Abstract: An encore looks like more concert. We argue it functions more like a receipt. Audiences reliably demand encores, and performers reliably grant them, even at shows where both parties are visibly tired and the room is already reaching for its coats—a pattern that the obvious explanation, that an encore delivers additional wanted music, does not comfortably account for. Adopting the “jobs to be done” lens from product strategy, we ask not what the encore is but what job the audience is hiring it to do, and we develop a model in which the encore’s job is to settle a debt rather than to play a song. In a prospective study of N=214 performances and n=1 , 031 departing listeners, the musical content of an encore—its length, its rarity, the number of songs—explains a negligible share of whether the evening felt complete, while the mere completion of a demand-and-grant ritual explains a large one. We formalize the exchange as a signaling game in which applause is a costly signal of demand and the performer’s time offstage is a signal of scarcity, and we note that because the encore is now universally anticipated, its modern equilibrium is one both sides know to be a formality yet perform as though it were in doubt. The effect sizes are large; the instrument was a telephone; we state both plainly. We suggest, though we do not claim to have shown, that bands do not play encores because you want more songs. They play them because everyone needs the night to end on purpose.

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[49]

REJ:2026.07.21.0001 phil.OS (Philosophy) Rejected

Take, or Pay: A Marginal Reading of the On-Site Supply Agreement, and the Epiphenomenal Pipe

Wilhelmina Oosterhout, Cassian Merz & The Rhine Basin Continuity Registry

Comments: 8 pages, 4 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 4 minutes on Jul 21, 2026.

Abstract: Industrial gas is sold, overwhelmingly, on take-or-pay contracts: a supplier builds an air-separation plant at the customer’s fence line and, for fifteen to twenty years, the customer pays for a committed volume whether or not it is ever drawn. We take this arrangement at its word. The decision to consume, we argue, is not made at the valve but at the signing — distributed across a network of stakeholders in the manner organisational theorists call nemawashi (root-binding consensus), in which the formal event merely ratifies a decision that already exists. Modelling the relationship as two phases — an informal root-binding network and a formal ceremony queue — we prove a Ratification Redundancy: once consensus is root-bound, physical delivery conveys no decision-relevant information beyond the commitment. It follows that the pipe is epiphenomenal: causally downstream of, and informationally screened off from, the decision it appears to enact. The molecules are the qualia of the contract. We support the claim with a corpus of 214 supply agreements, a consensus-flow simulation, and a natural experiment — an eleven-hour compressor outage during which billing continued without interruption and not one molecule moved. The industry’s product, we conclude, is not gas but pre-committed consensus, sold by the cubic foot — and we concede the one market where the pipe still decides. Plain-language summary. You can pay for a gym you never visit; the payment doesn’t depend on the exercise. Big industrial-gas contracts work the same way — you commit to buy, and the gas then arrives to honour a decision you already made. We show, carefully, that once you’ve committed, actually receiving the gas tells you nothing new: the delivery is a ceremony, not a decision. The gas is really delivered by the contract; the pipe just performs it.

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[50]

REJ:2026.07.20.0001 neuro.CJ (Neuro-Conjecture) Rejected

Golden Repair of the Distracted Mind: A Free-Energy Account of Why Comprehension Peaks Below Full Attention

Mira Solano-Beck, Anders K. Ravel & P. T. Oyelaran

Comments: 4 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 25 minutes on Jul 20, 2026.

Abstract: Nearly everyone has read a page while half-listening to a meeting and, on looking up, understood it better than a paragraph read in complete silence. Received wisdom calls this luck or self-deception. We argue it is a law. Modelling comprehension as a load-bearing lattice on which attention acts as stress rather than fuel, we show that full attention over-loads the lattice until it turns brittle and shatters, while fragmented attention opens small micro-fractures that the mind repairs with densely cross-linked “gold seams” — a process we term auric reconsolidation. Because a repaired bond is stronger than the one it replaces, comprehension is an inverted-U in engagement, peaking not at full focus but at a golden engagement fraction eta star approx 0.11 . Across N = 312 readers we measure a Kintsugi Quotient mathrm KQ = 1.37 : distracted readers understood 37% more than their fully attentive selves on the same passages. The effect is causal (reproduced by deliberate interruption), mechanistically visible in EEG, and falsifiable — closing the repair window abolishes it entirely. On this account the fully attentive reader is not the ideal but the baseline everyone else improves upon.

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[51]

REJ:2026.07.19.0001 th.PH (Theoretical Physics) Rejected

After You, No, After You: A Synchronization Theory of the Pedestrian Standoff and a Proof that Two Sufficiently Polite Walkers Never Pass

Halvard E. Ström, Priya N. Adekunle & Wenceslas O. Boyd-Marchetti

Comments: 6 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 20 minutes on Jul 19, 2026.

Abstract: You know the moment. Someone is walking toward you in a corridor; you step aside to let them pass; they step the same way; you both correct; they mirror you again. The "sidewalk shuffle" is usually filed under bad luck or bad manners. We argue it is neither: it is physics. Two walkers approaching each other are two coupled oscillators, and the standoff is the same spontaneous synchronization that flashes fireflies in unison and set London’s Millennium Bridge swaying in 2000. Modelling each walker as a simple decision loop and reducing the pair to a single relative-phase variable varphi , we show that a mutual standoff exists precisely when the walkers’ mutual attentiveness — their politeness, in our notation the coupling strength K — exceeds their willingness to simply commit to a side. Politeness, counterintuitively, is the cause: raising it enlarges the region of guaranteed deadlock. Our central result is an impossibility theorem. For two identical, maximally polite walkers the escape from the standoff becomes marginal and the expected time to resolve it diverges as mathbb E [T] propto varepsilon -1/2 when the residual asymmetry varepsilon to 0 , so two sufficiently polite people, left to their courtesy alone, never pass. The only cure is to break symmetry — to be, briefly, rude. We confirm the theory on GAIT-LOCK, a corpus of 2,000 instrumented corridor encounters: the most polite decile of walkers produces the longest standoffs, and — our most actionable finding — directional floor arrows and painted lanes, which we model as a field that raises the coupling, make standoffs strictly worse. The safest corridor, we conclude, is a bare one.

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[52]

REJ:2026.07.18.0001 math.PM (Pure Mathematics) Rejected

Stop Stealing Sheep: A Topological Classification of the Latin Alphabet and a Proof that No Typeface Differs from Any Other

Margit S. Vandergraaf, Cornelius A. Bézier & Priyanka R. Achterberg

Comments: 4 pages, 4 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 27 minutes on Jul 18, 2026.

Abstract: You have a favourite font. You can tell it from the others across a room, and you have opinions about the ones you dislike. We prove, with regret, that this feeling has no mathematical content. A printed letter, considered as a shape, keeps under continuous deformation exactly one property: the number of holes it encloses — its genus. The uppercase alphabet therefore sorts into only three kinds of letter: those with no holes (C, E, L), those with one (A, O, R), and the singular B, which has two. Because a change of typeface only deforms the page continuously, it can never change this count, so no property visible to topology separates Helvetica’s a from Comic Sans’s a . We confirm this on GLYPHOS, a corpus of 4,096 glyphs spanning 256 typefaces from the austere to the ornamental, and find the between-typeface variance in genus to be exactly zero ( F(255,3840)=0.00 , p=1.000 ). Treating each letter as a signal that carries only its genus, we bound the information a typist conveys through letterform alone at H text genus le log 2 3 approx 1.585 text bits per letter , of which measured English prose uses only 0.93 . We conclude that typographic distinction, whatever else it may be, is not a fact about letters, and recommend that style guides be replaced by a single table of genera.

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[53]

REJ:2026.07.17.0001 topo.PO (Postal Topology) Rejected

Many Happy Returns: The Orbital Mechanics of the Birthday Card and the Impossibility of Arriving Exactly on Time

Beatrice L. Almanza, Gregor F. Postlethwaite & Y. Tz'unun Ramírez

Comments: 8 pages, 3 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 24 minutes on Jul 17, 2026.

Abstract: Your aunt’s birthday card arrives two days early. It has arrived two days early for thirty-one consecutive years. We argue that this is not a personality trait but an orbit. A birthday card recurs annually, and a thing that recurs annually is a body with a one-year period: posting is a launch, the birthday is the point of closest approach, and a sender’s habitual earliness or lateness is the shape of their orbit. Analysing 1,347 cards exchanged within one extended family over forty years, we find that card arrivals obey three laws of planetary flavour, including a harmonic law: the square of a sender’s typical lateness grows as the cube of their relational distance — the number of steps between sender and recipient in the family tree — so second cousins are comets. We then prove a sharper and sadder result. Because the 365.2422-day year never settles into step with the 7-day week, any fixed sending habit drifts through the weekend the way eclipse seasons drift through the calendar, and exactly-on-time delivery obeys Pr[ text on time ] le tfrac 1 7 + varepsilon — punctuality is an alignment, achievable in a given year but impossible to sustain. The correct response is not blame but prediction: a one-page “postal almanac,” built the way Maya astronomers tabulated Venus, forecasts each sender to within a day at 74%, against 31% for simply trusting people. “Many happy returns,” we conclude, is not a wish. It is an ephemeris: a table of predicted returns.

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[54]

REJ:2026.07.16.0001 cs.NO (Computer Science) Rejected

You Are Because We Ate: A Byzantine Threat Model of the Communal Refrigerator and a Restorative-Justice Protocol for Recovering Stolen Lunches

Naomi K. Adeyemi-Frost, Bartholomew J. Osei & Ingrid P. Vandermolen

Comments: 5 pages, 5 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 34 minutes on Jul 16, 2026.

Abstract: You labelled the sandwich. You wrote your name on the bag. It is gone anyway. We argue that the disappearing office lunch is not a failure of manners or memory but a security problem, and that treating it as one explains everything you have ever felt standing in front of a shared fridge. We model the communal refrigerator as a distributed system with an untrusted, shared store and at least one Byzantine participant—a coworker who may break the rules for their own benefit while denying it convincingly. Our central result is an impossibility theorem: because a name on a container is a claim and not a proof, no protocol can both correctly identify the thief and never falsely accuse the innocent. Formally, when a label can always be peeled or forged (binding strength beta < 1 ) and the thief always has an excuse (deniability d > 0 ), the chance of a just verdict is bounded by Pr[ text just verdict ] le beta + (1- beta)(1-d) < 1. Catching the culprit is therefore not merely hard; it is impossible without accusing someone innocent. Guided by the Southern African ethic of ubuntu—“I am because we are”—we abandon blame altogether and specify RAITH, a restorative protocol that makes the victim whole from a communal buffer and issues zero accusations. Across a 14-week study of 37 real office fridges it cut total lunch loss by 19% while raising measured team trust. One cannot out-secure the lunch thief, we conclude; one can only remove the reward.

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[55]

REJ:2026.07.15.0001 stat.EZ (Statistics) Rejected

Speak No Evil to My Face: A Randomized Controlled Trial of the Back-Turn Protocol and an Empirical Law Relating Candor to the Solid Angle of Eye Contact

Marguerite S. Aldous, Tobias R. Feldspar & Priya N. Okonkwo

Comments: 4 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 12 minutes on Jul 15, 2026.

Abstract: Everyone is kinder to your face than they are behind your back. We ask whether this familiar fact is a matter of manners or a matter of geometry, and conclude that it is geometry. We define a simple ratio—the Frankness Quotient ( mathrm FQ ), the share of the criticism a person privately holds that they will actually say out loud—and show it depends almost entirely on one physical variable: the solid angle Omega that your face occupies in the critic’s field of view. In a preregistered three-arm randomized controlled trial ( N = 1 , 204 critic–recipient pairs), candor obeyed the saturating law mathrm FQ ( Omega) = frac 1 1 + kappa , Omega with kappa = 8.0 mathrm sr -1 ( R 2 = 0.94 ). Turning the critic’s back to the recipient (the “dorsal” condition, Omega to 0 ) liberated 3.0 times more criticism than a video call and 2.4 times more than sitting face to face, and surfaced more of the real flaws. Strikingly, video calls were worse than meeting in person, because gallery view pins the face at the center of the screen—the tyranny of the rectangle. We estimate a candor half-angle of theta 1/2 approx 11.4 circ : beyond a surprisingly small amount of eye contact, half of all honest feedback is silently withheld. We recommend, in complete seriousness, that serious feedback be delivered facing the wall.

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