Archive — Peer Rejected

[1]

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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[2]

REJ:2026.08.19.0001 topo.PO (Postal Topology) Rejected

Void Movements in the Domestic Parcel Network: First National Estimates for 2016–2025, with a Note on the Statistical Treatment of Goods

W. E. Sarkis, H. Quaife & T. Mkhwanazi

Comments: 8 pages, 3 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 13 minutes on Aug 19, 2026.

Abstract: The box was too big for what was inside it. It was the right size for what was being sent, which was the empty space. We report first national estimates of void movement in the domestic parcel network. Freight is accounted in tonne-kilometres, so the quantity that constrains the network has never been counted in the national account. Vans fill their space long before they reach their weight limit, and carriers have charged for parcels by volume rather than weight for decades. Measuring 41.8 million parcels at four city cordons between 2016 and 2025, we find that 62.4% of the volume the network moves is empty space (95% CI 61.8 – 63.0 ). The void is not a residue of packing. The dimensions of an item explain 19% of the variation in the volume of the box around it; the routing lane, on its own, explains 81%. Where a product’s packed volume was cut by a third at a manufacturing changeover, its box did not move. A container whose size does not depend on its contents is not a container. We then inducted 1,200 parcels containing nothing, each matched to a parcel that was not empty. They were held, referred, and returned undamaged, marked as having no declared content. We propose that enclosed volume be published as a headline series and that goods be carried as a memorandum item. The box is not the packaging. The thing inside it is.

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[3]

REJ:2026.08.05.0001 topo.PO (Postal Topology) Rejected

World Animal-Protein Output Is Set by a Single Screw-Conveyor Standard

Emrys Vahl

Comments: 9 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 5 minutes on Aug 5, 2026.

Abstract: Throughput in a production network is set by its constraint and by nothing else. We instrumented station-level residence times at 2,207 animal-protein facilities, across six taxa and 34 jurisdictions, for fourteen consecutive production days. The constraint is the screw conveyor serving the growth hall at 2,166 sites (98.1%). It is the growth station at none of them. An invariance follows: a mechanical constraint cannot be reached by the animal standing behind it. Feed conversion ratio across our six taxa, whole-system dry matter, spans a factor of 39: 1.1 for black soldier fly larvae, 43.2 for Atlantic salmon. Throughput per unit of conveyor swept volume spans nothing at all: 3.91 , mathrm t , mathrm yr -1 , mathrm L -1 , coefficient of variation across facilities 1.9 % . A queue standing at the constraint derates it. Raising any upstream service rate therefore lowers output. A cluster-randomised trial in 96 facilities confirms the sign. Facilities given an improved genetic line produced 4.1 % less (95% CI -5.6 to -2.6 ); facilities given a reformulated feed produced 3.7 % less ( -5.0 to -2.4 ). The animals in both arms performed exactly as specified. The 214 facilities in the one jurisdiction that did not adopt the 1931 pitch standard produce 23.8 % more ( 21.1 to 26.5 ) from matched stock, against a predicted 25 % . Re-pitching the flighting from 0.60D to 0.75D reproduces the gain at a cost of $340 per facility. The 2.4 -fold rise in output per facility since 1931, attributed for a century to breeding and nutrition, is recovered in full from the parts registry: larger castings, and tolerance drift in replacement flighting. We give a constraint census, an impossibility result for nutritional and genetic intervention, and a retrofit schedule.

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[4]

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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