Archive — Peer Rejected

[37]

REJ:2026.07.09.0001 quant.LG (Quantum Linguistics) Rejected

Swift-Footed Autocomplete: The Homeric Noun–Epithet System as a Zero-Click Predictive-Text Engine, with a Defect Audit of Its Longest-Running Production Incident

Philomena Q. Hexworth-Adeyinka, Telemachus J. Braithwaite-Osei & Dagmar V. Papastavrou-Lindqvist

Comments: 6 pages, 4 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 9 minutes on Jul 9, 2026.

Abstract: Predictive text—the phone’s habit of guessing your next word—is widely regarded as a modern convenience that fails often enough to be a genre of joke. We show that it is instead an ancient technology that once worked flawlessly, and that its finest deployment has been in continuous production for roughly 2,750 years. Building on Milman Parry’s observation that the Homeric epithet is selected by the space remaining in the verse rather than by the situation—hence “blameless Aegisthus,” an epithet bestowed on the epic’s principal murderer—we demonstrate that the noun–epithet system of the Iliad and Odyssey constitutes a zero-click completion engine. Conditioned on name, grammatical case, and metrical slot, epithet choice carries 0.032 bits of information: the bard, on average, chooses nothing. We audit the system’s fabled economy as a lookup table and find a 0.9 % collision rate; we show in a randomized trial ( N=48 ) that the engine reduces compositional latency 8.7 -fold, to near performance speed; and we measure a semantic defect rate of 0.31 % , roughly thirty times more reliable than the autocorrect in the reader’s pocket. Modern predictive text fails, we argue, because it guesses meaning inside an unconstrained interface, whereas the hexameter constrained the interface until there was nothing left to guess. Our recommendations include a meter.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[38]

REJ:2026.07.09.0001 myth.AP (Applied Mythology) Rejected

The Horse Passed Inspection: A Retrospective Structural, Acoustic, and Epistemic Audit of the Wooden Horse of Troy

Petronella A. Duyvenhage-Okafor, Casimir L. Vranckx-Adeyemi & Ifigeneia R. Sandhurst-Papadaki

Comments: 9 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 36 minutes on Jul 9, 2026.

Abstract: The fall of Troy is routinely described as the most consequential engineering failure of the ancient world. It is therefore remarkable that in thirty-two centuries no one has audited the engineering. We do so here, treating the classical sources—Homer, Virgil, Apollodorus, and Quintus of Smyrna—as the surviving accident file. Our finding is unambiguous: the horse was fine. By hand calculation, the legs carry their design load with a factor of safety of roughly 1,100 against buckling; a finite-element reconstruction and a one-sixth-scale replica loaded to failure agree. The horse passes 13 of the 14 checks of the applicable siege-gift code, and the fourteenth is a paperwork item. What failed at Troy was the meeting. Reconstructing Priam’s acceptance committee on the ladder of inference, we show that the council climbed seven rungs of interpretation on three observable facts, while the only two reviewers who tested the object rather than the story—Laocoön, with a spear, and Cassandra, with a track record—returned concordant negative findings ( kappa = 1.00 ) and were overruled. A modern replication ( N=212 ) confirms the mechanism: describing an unexamined object as “a gift” rather than “an object” moves the vote to bring it inside the walls from 24% to 71%. Troy did not fall to a horse. Troy fell to an unaudited inference, at committee, on a Tuesday. We close with remediation guidance, including mandatory spear-based non-destructive testing of all incoming monumental gifts (the Laocoön protocol).

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[39]

REJ:2026.07.09.0001 myth.AP (Applied Mythology) Rejected

The Trivium as a Threat Model: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric as Defense-in-Depth Against the Adversarial Interlocutor

Prudence A. Whately, M. Featherstonhaugh & Dorothea Quist

Comments: 5 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 6 minutes on Jul 9, 2026.

Abstract: Modern education assumes a cooperative reader. Classical education did not. We argue that the medieval trivium — grammar, logic, and rhetoric — has been systematically misclassified as a curriculum when it is, on the plain reading of its own sources, a three-layer defensive architecture engineered against a funded, adaptive, and persistent adversary: the professional persuader. Under this reading, grammar validates what was actually said, logic verifies that conclusions follow, and rhetoric — taught last, and only to the already hardened — trains the defender on the attacker’s own tools. The architecture makes a sharp quantitative prediction: susceptibility to persuasion exploits should fall multiplicatively, P = p 0 prod i (1-d i) , not additively, with each layer held. We confirm this in two populations separated by a century and a half of curricular decay: an archival corpus of 4,112 Victorian responses to patent-medicine advertising (1849–1901), and a randomized modern trial ( N=240 ) using formally valid "syllogistic phishing." Both populations fit a single curve, with full-stack protection reducing compromise eleven-fold. We then disclose a vulnerability present since deployment: text that merely looks like Latin inherits the accumulated authority of the classical corpus and inverts the defense entirely, raising compliance among our best-trained subjects from 4% to 52% (the Lorem Ipsum vulnerability). The trivium works; its most devoted users are its largest attack surface. We recommend the first curriculum patch since 1599.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[40]

REJ:2026.07.09.0001 cs.NO (Computer Science) Rejected

The Sperry Floor: A Critical Alertness Beyond Which the Optimal Supervisor Is Asleep

Sølve H. Marchetti-Okonkwo, Ineke R. Vásquez-Blyth & Tobias E. Nakamura-Field

Comments: 5 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 19 minutes on Jul 9, 2026.

Abstract: Safety culture has one commandment: stay awake, stay alive. We show that once automation is good enough this advice quietly inverts, and that the point where it inverts is a measurable constant. The idea is simple. A near-perfect autopilot rarely needs help, so an alert human with a free hand spends that hand on corrections the machine did not need—and every needless nudge adds error. We fold this trade-off into one number, the Sperry number mathrm Sp , and find the best alertness is A star=- ln mathrm Sp , which reaches sleep at mathrm Sp c=1 . In plain terms: past a threshold, the safest supervisor is a sleeping one. On the clinical sleepiness scale this threshold is the Sperry Floor, mathrm KSS star = 7.4 pm 0.3 —and a driving-simulator study ( N=48 ), a field study of 512 episodes, and 10 4 simulations all agree on it. The blunt corollary: for a good-enough self-driving car, the safest driver is asleep.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[41]

REJ:2026.07.09.0001 soc.TH (Social Thermodynamics) Rejected

The Cavendish Floor: A Gravitational Lower Bound on Deliberated Judgment

Halvard N. Eastcastle-Ruiz, Miren A. Sołtys & Cordelia B. Ngwenya-Fairfax

Comments: 5 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 25 minutes on Jul 9, 2026.

Abstract: It is taken as a figure of speech that a serious person shows gravity and that a hard choice is a weighty one. We show that this is no figure of speech but a physical law with a measurable constant. Treating a deliberating agent as a particle in a decision potential U(x;g) whose wells are the domains of the Cynefin sensemaking framework, we prove that the barrier separating one defensible commitment from another has height Delta U = tfrac14 a 2 g —linear in local gravitational acceleration. In plain terms: gravity is what makes a decision stick, and as gravity falls, decisions stop settling. Below a universal critical acceleration—the Cavendish Floor g ast = 2.7 pm0.2~ mathrm m ,s -2 = (0.28 pm0.02) ,g oplus —the wells vanish, the four domains become indistinguishable, and every problem presents as undifferentiated Chaos. A pre-registered parabolic-flight experiment ( N=48 , with partial-gravity Lunar and Martian profiles), a matched field study of 512 orbital and ground decision events ( kappa=0.81 ), and 10 4 Langevin deliberators all place the transition at the same acceleration, with a continuous mean-field exponent beta = 0.50 pm0.03 ; in plain terms, three unrelated ways of measuring agree on where deliberation switches on. Because g ast falls between Lunar ( 0.17 ,g oplus ) and Martian ( 0.38 ,g oplus ) surface gravity, we obtain a sharp and testable corollary: one can deliberate on Mars but not on the Moon. Judgment, we conclude, is not transmitted or reasoned but convened against a field: assemble a gravitational field, or convene no judgment at all.

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[42]

REJ:2026.07.08.0001 clim.FR (Fringe Climatology) Rejected

The Arniko Height: A Critical Threshold for Climatic Sovereignty in Vertically Tiered Structures

Sunila R. Vaidya-Thorne, Anselm K. Røed & Padmini S. Ferreira-Lall

Comments: 5 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 28 minutes on Jul 8, 2026.

Abstract: It is taken as a figure of speech that a tall building makes its own weather. We show that it is a threshold phenomenon. Modelling a tiered structure as a one-dimensional advection–condensation column, we treat every occupied, ornamented storey as a moisture source—a dwelling flux—whose upward accumulation competes with lateral exchange with the regional climate through a single dimensionless Pagoda number mathrm Pa . In plain terms: a tall enough, densely built enough building starts to hold its own moisture, and past a point it rains on itself. We prove that the climate-coupled state loses stability at mathrm Pa = mathrm Pa c , above which the upper tiers run a self-sustaining internal monsoon—an endomonsoon—on their own calendar. Height thus becomes a matter of regime, not degree: below a sharp critical height a building is a tenant of the sky; above it, a sovereign of its own. That height—the Arniko Height H ast = 47.3 pm 1.2 tiers—is a building-independent constant that a pre-registered field campaign ( N=63 ), a controlled stacked-chamber experiment, and 10 4 Monte-Carlo runs all agree upon, with a continuous transition ( beta = 0.63 pm 0.04 ) and a season-independent period tau mathrm mon = 6.2 pm 0.3 days. We conclude that the pagoda was not architecture imitating the heavens but the first working climate: assemble forty-seven storeys, or remain a tenant of the sky.

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[43]

REJ:2026.07.08.0001 quant.LG (Quantum Linguistics) Rejected

Meaning Requires a Quorum: Unanimous Semantic Collapse and the Pentad Bound on Interpretation

Wilhelmina Ascott-Pryce, Théodore Nkondo-Vasquez & Priya Halvorsen

Comments: 6 pages, 6 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 9 minutes on Jul 8, 2026.

Abstract: It is treated as a figure of speech that a listener knows what you mean. We show that it is a capacity theorem. We model interpretation as a measurement problem: an utterance does not possess a definite meaning at the instant it is spoken but exists in a superposition of admissible readings, and a listener is a projective measurement that resolves that superposition—privately, and idiosyncratically. Public meaning requires a joint measurement by an interpretive quorum, and we prove that only unanimity performs it: any agreement short of unanimous leaves the utterance in a mixed sector and decoheres it into stable, load-bearing ambiguity. In plain terms: one listener fixes a private meaning; a majority does not fix a public one—it makes the ambiguity permanent; only a room that agrees all at once brings a single meaning into being. The probability of unanimous collapse falls geometrically with quorum size, P mathrm collapse (N)= sum k p k N , so meaning-making bodies face a hard trade-off between robustness and resolvability whose optimum is a universal constant—the Pentad Bound, N ast =5.0 pm0.3 . Across a pre-registered field study of N=388 naturalistic interpretive events ( kappa=0.83 ), a controlled polysemy-dosing experiment on 240 participants, and 10 4 Monte-Carlo runs of an interpretive lattice, the collapse rate obeys the predicted d 1-N law, the Consensus and Babel phases are separated by a continuous transition with mean-field exponent beta= tfrac12 , and the optimum quorum sits at five in every method. We conclude that meaning is not transmitted but convened: assemble five, or mean nothing at all.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[44]

REJ:2026.07.07.0001 spec.EC (Speculative Economics) Rejected

The Otis Bound: An Information-Theoretic Ceiling on the Value Conveyable Between Two Floors

Marisol Otway-Pell, Cassian D. Verhoeven & Petra Nkemelu

Comments: 7 pages, 3 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 23 minutes on Jul 7, 2026.

Abstract: It is folklore that a good idea can be pitched between two floors of an elevator. We show that this is not folklore but a capacity theorem. Treating the transit as a communication channel whose binding resource is the listener’s attention rather than the passage of time, we derive a hard upper bound—the Otis Bound mathcal O = C 0(1 - e -T/ tau ) —on the mutual information a pitcher can convey to a listener in a single ride. In plain terms: there is a ceiling on how much of any idea can actually land, and no building is tall enough to raise it, because attention, not travel time, is what runs out. Per-floor conveyance collapses onto a building-independent Mezzanine Constant mu = 0.61 pm 0.03 , mathrm bits/floor ; half of every successful pitch arrives before the cab clears the first inter-floor gap. Ideas whose intended content exceeds mathcal O do not arrive truncated—they obliterate, collapsing into self-similar repetition through a second-order phase transition (order parameter Omega , critical exponent beta = tfrac 1 2 ). Across a pre-registered field study of N = 412 genuine two-party transits in 19 buildings, a programmable freight-elevator dose-response experiment, and a queueing simulation, we measure C 0 = 11.4 pm 0.6 bits and tau = 9.8 pm 0.4 s, placing the celebrated thirty-second window exactly at the 3 tau knee where conveyance reaches 95% of its ceiling. We conclude that a market’s apparent appetite for simple ideas is not philistinism but a channel-capacity result: an idea worth more than the Otis Bound cannot be sold, because it cannot arrive.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[45]

REJ:2026.07.06.0001 chrono.DY (Chronodynamics) Rejected

Every Cause Signed and Dated: A Forensic Chain-of-Custody Protocol for the Admissibility of Retrocausal Evidence

Halvard M. Quill, Ines V. Dalloway & M. R. Ainsleth

Comments: 4 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 28 minutes on Jul 6, 2026.

Abstract: It is standard practice, in the laboratory and the courtroom alike, to throw out any evidence in which an effect is observed before its cause. We argue that this is a filing error, not a law of nature. A court does not reject a bloodstain because blood is impossible; it rejects it when the chain of custody—the signed, dated, unbroken record of who held the exhibit and when—has a gap. We show that retrocausal evidence has only ever been excluded on those procedural grounds, never physical ones. We introduce the Causal Custody Chain ( mathrm C 3 ), a notarized, tamper-evident ledger that tracks a cause backwards from its observed effect to its eventual origination—accepting signatures from custodians who do not yet exist—and define the temporal displacement Delta tau (how far ahead of its cause an effect is seen). Our main result, an Admissibility Theorem, shows that an intact chain makes an effect admissible as evidence of its own future cause whenever Delta tau le tau 0 ln 2 , a chain-of-custody “half-life” set by how long a notary’s seal stays trustworthy. In a pre-registered study of N=240 event pairs adjudicated by a blinded twelve-member tribunal, intact custody yielded 91.3 % admissibility (rater agreement kappa=0.81 ) and fixed tau 0 = 3.7 pm0.2 , mathrm s . We conclude that the future is not inadmissible—merely poorly documented: sign and date every cause, and it becomes discoverable.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]