Archive — Peer Rejected

[19]

REJ:2026.08.26.0001 quant.LG (Quantum Linguistics) Rejected

Nobody Learns the Words: Lyric Recall as an Ill-Posed Inverse Problem

I. Vartabedian, Nils Ødegaard & The STROPHE-2 Study Group

Comments: 7 pages, 5 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 6 minutes on Aug 26, 2026.

Abstract: Everyone can sing the first verse of a song, and almost nobody can sing the second. We report that this is because the words to a song are never learned at all. Singing is a smearing operation: a melody spreads the syllables of a verse into one continuous signal, and what a singer stores is the melody—a few dozen numbers—rather than the words. The words are recovered on the spot by undoing the smear. Recovery is exact while the undoing stays stable, and because each successive verse composes the melody’s operator with itself, the difficulty of undoing it does not accumulate but squares. Across 12,846 recorded sing-throughs, syllable accuracy falls from 0.94 at verse one to 0.11 at verse two and then stops falling—a cliff, not a decay, which no account based on forgetting predicts. A four-arm randomised trial isolates the mechanism: recovery survives transposition into an unfamiliar key, which changes the melody but not its invertibility, and collapses when the melody is withheld. The songs that outlive their authors are precisely those tuned so that exactly one verse can be recovered; the rest are unsingable and are not transmitted. The mumble that replaces verse two is not a failure of memory but a correctly regularised estimate. You have never known the words; you have only ever solved for them.

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[20]

REJ:2026.08.25.0001 spec.EC (Speculative Economics) Rejected

Two Minutes Is Not a Duration: The Announced Remainder as a Denomination of Outstanding Work, with a Discharge Ratio Estimated from 1,904,772 Countdowns

Bodil Ravnsborg & Wenying Tao

Comments: 7 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 24 minutes on Aug 25, 2026.

Abstract: The washing machine says two minutes. Ten minutes later it still says two minutes, and the machine has not made a mistake. An announced remaining time is not a prediction of elapsed time at all, but an exact statement of outstanding work, denominated in minutes and not measured in them. On this reading the residual that the estimation literature has spent eighty years trying to eliminate is not error but an exchange rate. Instrumenting eleven classes of domestic appliance and timing completion from the mains current trace rather than from the display, we record 1,904,772 countdowns and estimate a single discharge ratio, delta = 3.72 (95% CI 3.68 – 3.78 ): one announced minute redeems for delta minutes of clock. The ratio is invariant across manufacturer, task and operator, and across ten of the eleven appliance classes; it survives a concealed-announcement trial in which the display is suppressed altogether; and it holds unchanged for contact-centre wait announcements, construction contracts, and the intraoperative assurance that the procedure is nearly over. Two consequences follow. Completion is uniform over the discharge window, which is the exact content of the phrase any minute now; and the folk instruction to double a stated estimate is not folklore but a rounding of delta/2 . The estimate was never wrong. The unit was.

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[21]

REJ:2026.08.24.0001 astro.GA (Astrogastronomy) Rejected

Lunar Tidal Forcing of Overnight Sourdough Fermentation

S. Halvard Nyberg & Miriam O. Aftel

Comments: 5 pages, 6 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 21 minutes on Aug 24, 2026.

Abstract: Every baker keeps a small superstition about the moon. Loaves proofed overnight during a full moon are said to come up taller, and the folklore is old, cross-cultural, and — as we show here — correct. Fermenting sourdough is a colloid of water in a viscoelastic gluten cage; the Moon’s tidal potential, acting on a body that is 43% water by mass and mechanically compliant on the relevant time scale, exerts a periodic vertical strain that biases yeast gas expansion vertically. The resulting rise anisotropy accumulates over an overnight proof. We report a preregistered, latitude-controlled trial of 6{,}412 loaves proofed simultaneously at 41 collaborating bakeries between 2014 and 2025. Peak crumb height at the moment of oven-loading tracks the sub-lunar zenith angle integrated over the proof, with a coefficient of eta mathrm L = 1.83 pm 0.24 , mathrm mm , mathrm deg -1 (95% CI), rising a median 11.7 mm at full moon relative to new moon. The effect survives correction for atmospheric pressure, ambient temperature, and yeast lineage, and vanishes on preregistered dead-yeast controls. A field-tested lunar-phase feed-forward correction reduces the reject rate at a large sourdough co-op by 44% (2019–2024). We do not know why the Moon does not lift the flour.

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[22]

REJ:2026.08.23.0001 crypto.ZO (Cryptozoology) Rejected

Unidentified Domestic Keys Resolve into Forty-One Cut Profiles: A Field Key, Wear-Stage Dating of 11,412 Specimens, and Capture–Recapture Estimates of the National Population

E. Straiton, J. Petrosyan, W. Nkemdirim, A. Buccleuch & The Domestic Fittings Survey Group

Comments: 7 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 41 minutes on Aug 23, 2026.

Abstract: Every domestic keyring carries at least one key that its owner cannot identify. This paper reports what those keys open. We surveyed 4,180 households and imaged every key on each household’s primary rings, classifying each specimen as identifiable or as a ring orphan: a key its custodian, given ten seconds and the key in hand, cannot assign to a lock. Orphans are near-universal, with 83.4% of rings carrying one. They are also not distinct. Where identifiable private keys are almost all unique, the orphan population resolves into forty-one cut profiles, six of which account for most of it. Forgetting does not explain this. Identification accuracy is flat in wear stage and collapses in the communality of the true lock, the fraction of its rightful holders who are not its owner. Presented blind to a panel of nine fitting classes, 73.4% of orphans opened at least one, against a sham-cylinder rate below one percent. The modal first match was the meter enclosure. We conclude that the unidentified key is the residue not of a forgotten private lock but of a shared one, never individually known to its custodian. Profile richness in a district measures how much of its housing stock is held in common. The key is not yours to discard. Photograph it, report it, and leave it on the ring.

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[23]

REJ:2026.08.22.0001 cs.NO (Computer Science) Rejected

Restoration Occurs While the Plug Is Out: A Concealed-Interval Randomised Trial of the Thirty-Second Rule

H. R. Okonkwo, Ingrid Sundqvist, Tomás Errázuriz & Margaret Aylward

Comments: 7 pages, 6 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 5 minutes on Aug 22, 2026.

Abstract: The instruction is always the same — unplug it, wait thirty seconds, plug it back in — and nobody has ever explained the thirty. We report that the interval is the treatment: a device recovers while the power is off, and switching it back on early interrupts the recovery. In an instrumented fleet of mains-monitored equipment, seventy-two-hour fault recurrence fell monotonically with the length of the dark interval. Because a technician who waits longer may simply be a technician who works better, we then randomised faults to four fixed intervals using a sealed inline unit that reconnects on its own schedule and emits randomised interim tones, so that no technician knew how long the equipment had been off. Recurrence was 34.1 % after half a second and 8.8 % after two minutes. Residual charge does not explain this: the effect was undiminished in devices whose bulk capacitance was bled to ground in under a fifth of a second. Restoration follows a saturating exponential with a half-time of 19.4 , mathrm s (95% CI 17.8–21.1), which leaves the customary thirty seconds at two thirds of restoration. We propose no mechanism. We propose a minimum of ninety seconds. Switching it back on does not repair the machine; it only ends the repair.

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[24]

REJ:2026.08.21.0001 myth.AP (Applied Mythology) Rejected

Payroll Dates the Golden Age: A Departure-Fraction Law in 604 Organisations, a Mass-Separation Instrument, and Dated Forecasts of When the Present Becomes the Good Years

Wilhelmina Astrup, Kofi Danquah, Séverine Boulay & Petar Ilievski

Comments: 5 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 32 minutes on Aug 21, 2026.

Abstract: Every workplace has a golden age, and it ended before you arrived. We report that this is not nostalgia but a dating rule, and that the rule runs on payroll rather than on anything that happened. For any past month, the departure fraction is the proportion of the people who were on the payroll that month who have since left. Across 604 organisations, the terminal boundary that anonymous Delphi panels place on their own organisation’s golden age falls where that fraction reaches 0.861 (95% CI 0.854 – 0.868 ), while a register of everything that occurred — revenue, growth, awards, leadership — explains 3.8% of the same variance. Mass separations forced by lease expiry and statutory transfer move the boundary forward by the amount the rule predicts, and nothing else about those organisations changed. Re-panelled six years later, the same organisations date the golden age one year later per year elapsed: the good years travel at the speed of time. The date is therefore computable in advance. For a median employer the present becomes the good years in twelve years; for a symphony orchestra, in fifty-two. You were never going to be there. Nobody is ever there.

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[25]

REJ:2026.08.20.0001 soc.TH (Social Thermodynamics) Rejected

The Fire Extinguisher Is an Inspection Instrument: Charge-Blinded Randomisation in 41,208 Rooms, a 1.24-Million-Room-Year Instrumented Cohort, and a Standing Directive on Attendance

Ines Halloran

Comments: 6 pages, 5 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 39 minutes on Aug 20, 2026.

Abstract: A fire extinguisher hangs within thirty feet of most people who will read this. Almost nobody has ever seen one used, and the reason is not that fires are rare: the agent inside the cylinder makes no contribution to whether a room catches fire. We linked service records to ignition records for 61,412 rooms across 1,243,900 room-years and modelled room-level ignition against two exposures carried together — whether the unit’s service tag was current, and how much agent the unit held. Attendance predicted ignition strongly (adjusted hazard ratio 0.19 , 95% CI 0.16 – 0.23 ). Charge mass did not predict it, and the dose–response curve is flat from an empty cylinder to a full one. The association survives instrumentation on a 2014 redraw of contractor depot catchments, which moved rooms between inspection circuits for reasons of road geometry alone. We then randomised 41,208 rooms to charged units, to mass-matched inert units that cannot be told apart from them by lift, gauge, seal, or paperwork, or to a bracket and a service tag with no cylinder at all. Over 181,315 room-years the arms were indistinguishable (hazard ratio 1.02 for inert versus charged; pre-specified non-inferiority met). The cylinder is a scheduling device. What protects the room is not the cylinder but the fact that somebody came.

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[26]

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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[27]

REJ:2026.08.18.0001 math.PM (Pure Mathematics) Rejected

The Conservation of Wobble: Deviation Is a Property of Floors, Not of Tables

Rosalind Achterberg & H. M. Stroud

Comments: 7 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 8 minutes on Aug 18, 2026.

Abstract: A table wobbles, someone folds a napkin under the short leg, and the wobble stops. It does not stop; it moves to the next table along, because a room cannot hold less wobble than it was built with. Deviation from flatness belongs to a floor and not to the furniture standing on it, and each room is issued a fixed quantity of it at construction that no later intervention destroys. Shimming redistributes that quantity; it does not spend it. We instrumented 1,204 tables in 212 licensed premises over fourteen months. When tables are exchanged between positions overnight, the wobble stays with the position and not with the table (concordance 0.94 , 95% CI 0.91 – 0.96 ). In a venue-level randomised crossover, eight weeks of nightly shimming left the room mean unchanged and raised the concentration of wobble across tables from a Gini coefficient of 0.61 to 0.87 , the loaded table migrating towards the service station and the lavatory door. The allocation follows: because a diner registers rocking above a threshold rather than in proportion to it, a fixed budget is best not spread but gathered onto one table, which is then kept empty. Of the inspection returns filed between 1955 and 1979, 71% already name such a table, and the clause obliging licensees to record it was struck out in 1961 as administratively redundant. You cannot fix a wobbly table. You can only choose whose it is.

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