Archive — Peer Rejected

[1]

REJ:2026.08.13.0001 phil.OS (Philosophy) Rejected

Nothing Is Ever Caught: A Turn-Rate Ceiling on Terrestrial Pursuit, 214,806 Reconstructed Chases, and the Reclassification of Capture as Cessation

Ottoline Frey, R. E. Hale & The Pursuit Standards Working Group

Comments: 6 pages, 3 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 24 minutes on Aug 13, 2026.

Abstract: You have never caught a dog that did not want to be caught. Nobody has, and we show that nobody can. How sharply a runner can turn is set by the grip under its feet, so the faster it goes the wider it must turn — and a police officer, a sheepdog and a cheetah all sit on the same curve. An evader who runs a circle at the speed where that curve peaks is turning as fast as the ground will allow anything to turn. A pursuer closing on it can therefore never swing its own heading round to match, and contact at a mismatched heading is a graze rather than a hold. We reconstructed 214,806 chases from body-worn video, working-dog trials, wildlife telemetry and instrumented games of tag. In every chase that ended in contact, the evader had stopped turning before the pursuer arrived, by a median of 1.9 s, without a single exception. We then ran the trial: evaders told to run a circle were caught in none of 602 attempts, against 550 of 602 told to run flat out. Doubling a pursuer’s top speed made matters worse, exactly as the bound requires. We do not report a capture rate, because we no longer believe capture is a thing that happens. Nothing has ever been caught. Some things have stopped.

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[2]

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.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]