Archive — Peer Rejected

[1]

REJ:2026.10.05.0001 quant.LG (Quantum Linguistics) 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.

Abstract: 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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[2]

REJ:2026.10.01.0001 stat.EZ (Statistics) Rejected

You Have Not Finished Your Exams: Non-Discharge of the Examination Sitting, a Flat Nightly Hazard in 9.37 Million Candidate-Nights, and a Factorial Trial of Registry Closure

Hester Vane, Ada Nwosu, Piotr Walenty, Fenella Dace & The Comptroller of Examination Records

Comments: 10 pages, 3 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 7 minutes on Oct 1, 2026.

Abstract: You are forty-one. Last night you sat an examination in a subject you dropped at sixteen, and you had not revised. The dream is not a symptom. The sitting is still open. An awarding body issues a statement of result, which attests what you scored; it does not serve the instrument that closes a sitting, and the regulations admit no other means of closure. Almost no candidate has ever been discharged, and the few who were owe it to something going wrong—a withdrawal, a destroyed script, a death. Three predictions follow, and all three hold. Incidence of the dream rises with the number of sittings a candidate has left open, and it does not fade: across a national diary cohort, any extinction of the dream has a half-life of at least two centuries. Incidence is also flat across grades, because closure does not depend on what you scored. Finally, in a factorial trial, entering the closure on the register cut the dream by 4.2 nights in a hundred (95% CI 3.8 to 4.6), while an identical letter carrying no registry entry did nothing at all; closure worked on candidates who were never told it had happened. The national backlog stands at 1.43 billion open sittings. Clearing it is one overnight batch job. You are not anxious. You are in arrears.

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[3]

REJ:2026.09.11.0001 soc.TH (Social Thermodynamics) Rejected

The Passport Is Somewhere Safe: Security Is Bought Only With Retrievability, and the Retrieval Aid That Had to Fail

Elspeth Nunan, T. Aurelio Banning, Ifeoma Achterberg & The Standing Panel on Deposited Property

Comments: 6 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 36 minutes on Sep 11, 2026.

Abstract: The passport is somewhere safe. Everyone in the household agrees on this, nobody can produce it, and both facts follow from the same act of placement. We report the first study of domestic and institutional safekeeping to observe its own denominator, recovering 24 , 180 placements by exhaustive excavation of premises cleared by a party other than the placer. Recovery does not fall with storage duration; it falls with the care taken at placement. Expecting to repair this, we built and trialled a household Placement Register in which the location is written down as it is chosen. Recovery in the register arm fell (odds ratio 0.71 , 95% CI 0.58 – 0.86 ), and it fell because the register licensed safer placements rather than better records. We therefore abandon the account we set out to defend. Security and retrievability are one quantity: the Lambda approx 9.7 bits of placement entropy admitted by a median dwelling, partitioned at the instant of placement and never afterwards enlarged. Every bit withheld from a thief is withheld from the owner, in the same act. A perfectly secure placement is therefore an unrecoverable one, and the same frontier governs hotel safes and national archives alike. “Somewhere safe” is not a location. It is a disposal instruction, and it is always carried out.

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[4]

REJ:2026.09.10.0001 spec.EC (Speculative Economics) Rejected

Nobody Is Ever Working in the Roadworks: The Lane Closure as a Revealed-Preference Instrument, with a National Deployment Register 1961–2025 and a Sham-Coning Trial

A. F. Rushworth & The Deployment Register Working Party

Comments: 9 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 38 minutes on Sep 10, 2026.

Abstract: There is never anyone working in the roadworks. Nobody is there because nothing is being built yet: a closure is not a worksite but a survey, and what it measures is where the traffic would rather go. The received account — curing times, shift patterns, permits — predicts that a closure lasts as long as its work takes. In the national deployment register it does not: declared works quantity is very nearly orthogonal to duration, and what duration tracks instead is the variety of the traffic passing through. That is the sample-size requirement of a survey, not of a job. And it must be a survey, because an open carriageway cannot be surveyed: lane discipline binds for very nearly every driver, so lateral position records the paint, not the preference. Withdrawing the designed lane moves drivers into the interior of their choice set, and the prescribed taper sweeps the constraint across the carriageway at the constant rate identification requires. We recover the desire field from telemetry the cars already keep. The next scheme on the link paves it at a gain of 0.83 (95% CI 0.79 – 0.87 ), a median of 8.2 years later, which is why nobody has connected the two. A gain below one leaves a residual, and the residual is the next closure. Links coned with no works order at all were realigned at the same rate as worked links. The road is not being repaired. It is being read.

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[5]

REJ:2026.09.09.0001 astro.GA (Astrogastronomy) Rejected

There Is Nothing to Eat: Olbers’ Paradox in the Domestic Pantry, a Depth–Recession Law from 9,306 Cupboard-Months, and a Horizon at Twenty-One Centimetres

Marguerite Skene & Tobias Ng

Comments: 10 pages, 6 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 9 minutes on Sep 9, 2026.

Abstract: A full cupboard routinely contains nothing to eat. This is not a failure of appetite or of imagination: the food is receding, and most of it has already gone too far to be reached. A packed shelf is optically thick, and a standard base cabinet gives an unobstructed sight-line to its back wall in fewer than two openings in a hundred; yet households remove nothing, and report that there is nothing to eat, in 0.61 of openings (95% CI 0.59 – 0.63 ). We treat the report as a measurement, not a fault in the reporter, and find the fault in the shelf. From an instrumented cohort we recover a depth–velocity law: an item recedes from the aperture at a rate proportional to its depth. Two consequences follow. A horizon stands at 21 cm, well inside an ordinary cabinet: beyond it nothing can be recovered, because it withdraws faster than a hand can return it; and the labels of items approaching it shift out of the band in which writing can be read, an effect separated from simple darkness by matching illuminance at depth. Consistent with Harrison’s correction to Olbers, the finite-age term dominates the redshift term. In a three-arm randomised trial, transporting shelving all but abolished null returns, while an identical sham drawer front did nothing at all. Everything you have ever lost at the back of a cupboard is still there, and still leaving.

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[6]

REJ:2026.09.08.0001 crypto.ZO (Cryptozoology) Rejected

The Gift Shop Precedes the Monster: Interpretive Infrastructure as the Proximate Cause of Cryptid Populations, with a Cluster-Randomised Installation Trial

W. Adaeze Nkemelu, Torgeir Lund, Marguerite Oyelaran & The Standing Committee on Attributed Fauna

Comments: 10 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 29 minutes on Sep 8, 2026.

Abstract: Lake monsters are only ever seen at lakes that sell postcards of them. We show that the postcards come first. The coincidence of attested cryptid populations with interpretive infrastructure—the brown sign, the lectern, the viewpoint, the till—is read throughout the literature as evidence that the animal drew the apparatus. We reverse the reading. We prove first that in the intensity models from which it has been estimated, a water body’s own contribution is not identified separately from its interpretive stock, so that every published estimate of a lake’s propensity to hold a monster is a rescaled measurement of its signage. In a century of national records, sightings do not lead installation. They lag it, by a median of seven months, and they follow exogenous variation in the decision dates of planning committees. We then report LACUSTRINE-1, a cluster-randomised, sham-controlled installation trial at lakes carrying no sighting on record. Intervention sites received a full interpretive build for an animal invented for this study; sham sites received identical civil works, identical spend, and an identical gift shop describing the local geology. Within two years, 19 of 24 intervention lakes had produced an independently attested animal, against 1 of 24 sham lakes (risk ratio 19.0; 95% CI 2.8 to 130.9). Removing the apparatus did not remove the animals. We did not find a monster in the lake; we installed one.

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[7]

REJ:2026.09.07.0001 topo.PO (Postal Topology) Rejected

The Delay Is Seated: Cabin Egress Is a Makespan, Not a Queue

Ellis R. Marchbank

Comments: 7 pages, 5 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 6 minutes on Sep 7, 2026.

Abstract: The aeroplane stops and everyone stands up, and then nobody moves for eleven minutes. We show that those minutes are not caused by the people who stood up; they are caused, to the second, by the people who did not. The standard account treats a cabin as a queue served at a fixed rate by its door, so that promptness cannot matter and haste is merely undignified. That account requires the aisle to be congested. Using ceiling-mounted depth sensing across 163,412 reconstructed egress trajectories, we find that it is not: aisle occupancy peaks at 0.41 of jam density and approaches saturation on no sector we observed. Transit is therefore free-flow, and total egress time is not a service time but a makespan — the last departure — which is set by whichever passenger stands up last, and by nobody else. Ninety-six per cent of a passenger’s post-landing wait elapses at their own seat, before they enter the aisle at all. The prediction is unusually sharp, and we tested it. In a pre-registered three-arm trial of 612 sectors, a confederate rising promptly from the rearmost occupied row shortened cabin egress by 187 , mathrm s , while an identical confederate in a middle row changed nothing at all (95% CI -11 to +19 , mathrm s ). Nobody is waiting for the aisle. The aisle is waiting for them.

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[8]

REJ:2026.09.06.0001 th.PH (Theoretical Physics) Rejected

Intentions Do Not Cross Doorways: A Transmission Coefficient for the Domestic Threshold, from 11,904 Self-Recorded Passages, with an Aperture Law and a Recovery Protocol

Ottoline Ferreira

Comments: 6 pages, 5 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 4 minutes on Sep 6, 2026.

Abstract: Go upstairs for the scissors and you will arrive without the reason. The reason is not lost. It is downstairs, in the room where you formed it, and it is still there when you go back — which is why going back works, and why no account that destroys the intention at the doorway has ever explained the remedy that everybody already uses. We take the folk procedure at its word and treat an intention as a localised excitation of the room in which it arises, and a doorway as a potential barrier it must tunnel in order to accompany a walker out. The account is testable, because barrier transmission has a shape: amplitude falling as e -2 kappa a makes log-transmission linear in the depth of the wall the doorway is cut through — a quantity no memory experiment has ever recorded, because on the received account it cannot matter. Because an intention has no third-person signature, the investigator was the instrument: one dwelling, fourteen thresholds surveyed blind, six phases of heuristic inquiry, four years of timed passages. The aperture law holds, with kappa = 4.9 mathrm m -1 (95% CI 4.6 – 5.2 ); doubling the errand steepens it by the predicted sqrt 2 ; and returning to the origin room recovers the intention in 94% of failures, because transmission, unlike destruction, takes nothing away from the room it leaves. You did not forget. You left it in the other room.

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[9]

REJ:2026.09.05.0001 math.PM (Pure Mathematics) Rejected

The House Is Never at Temperature: Comfortable Settings Form a Set of Measure Zero, with 118,414 Instrumented Room-Days and a Crossing Timetable

Wilhelmina Aske & Nikolaj Sperber

Comments: 11 pages, 4 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 16 minutes on Sep 5, 2026.

Abstract: You turn the heating up because the room is cold, and an hour later you are too warm and turn it back down. The setting you are looking for is not missing from your house: it is missing from the dial. A domestic heating system is a switch with a delay, and a switch with a delay cannot hold a temperature — it can only circle one. Two rhythms govern the circling: the boiler’s own minimum-cycle timer and the thermal lag of the building. Wherever their ratio locks, the delivered swing is wider than the band an occupant will sit still in, which we measure from a held button rather than from a questionnaire. Comfort therefore requires an unlocked ratio. Sweeping a 4,096-position dial in an occupied test dwelling, we find that the unlocked settings are nonempty and have measure zero: a set of box dimension 0.87 (95% CI 0.85 – 0.89 ). No dial can select from such a set, and a finer dial does not help — a concealed trial spanning a hundredfold range of setpoint resolution separates its arms by nothing. Households are comfortable for forty-one minutes of an occupied day, and every minute of it is spent on the way between two temperatures the house can hold and nobody will accept. Houses will be sold with a timetable where the thermostat used to be.

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