Entropically Yours

I asked LinkedIn for everything it knows about me and found a hidden scorecard grading my professional worth across twelve dimensions, out of five. A conference talk in Crete: zero. A newspaper feature: zero. Aggregate: 1.01, bottom tier. The one inference it made with real confidence — that I have an “affinity for electric vehicles.” Nought for twelve on my career, one for one on my consumer desires.

A companion to the gen-ph census — the case that started it. There is a paper of mine that cannot be submitted to JHEP: not rejected, submitted. arXiv declined it and advised peer review elsewhere; JHEP’s portal won’t take a manuscript without an arXiv ID, and both submission routes stop at the same field. Nobody built this loop on purpose — four defensible steps composed into one nobody audited. On the accountability machinery that doesn’t exist here, and an appeal whose only remaining venue was a blog.

Folklore says physics.gen-ph is arXiv’s junk drawer — the soft landing where moderators file the papers nobody will read. So I ran the census: every gen-ph and gr-qc paper from 2020–2022. Nearly half get published, which kills the junk-drawer story. But a tenth of the gen-ph papers arrive at arXiv after their journal date, holding a receipt — a holding pen for work turned away at the door, published elsewhere, and readmitted. And of those, the number reaching a flagship venue is exactly zero.

The entropy of a black hole is its area over four, and for fifty years the four has been matched, never derived. From baseball pitches and four coins to Bekenstein and the cosmological horizon, here is the clean answer: a horizon keeps no clock and opens one way, and each fact costs you exactly half. No strings, no loops, no quantum gravity — just what any observer can and can’t know. (Spot the gerbil.)

Why Schrödinger had the wrong entity in the superposition, what Liouville's theorem has to do with your cat knocking things off tables, and the entity that lent you a timeline.

How depression, intellectual cross-training, and a paranoid review process became a research methodology. The black dog turns out to be an excellent research assistant, even if the working conditions are terrible.

The academic publishing system operates on a simple feedback loop: prestige begets prestige. High-status authors get easier publication; easier publication raises status; higher status attracts better work; better work reinforces status. The loop is self-sealing. This piece models the dynamics precisely and shows why double-blind review is not a procedural nicety but a structural necessity.