Happy April First!

[diogenesNY]

April First has arrived again, as it seems to with an astonishing annual consistency.

This is an occasion for many japes jests and other tomfoolery (at least if your name happens to be Tom), although us professional fools tend to treat it as a holiday, leaving the antics to inspired amateurs.

I did a quick look on Arxiv and did not see any of the, um, seasonal papers..... but it is reasonably likely that I may have missed something a bit too subtle for my sometimes obtuse sensibilities.

Anything fun out there that anyone has spied? Links?

Joy of the season from this fool to all my brethren and cistern!

 

[Baluncore]

Today is the day to share this link.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18380130/
Apparently, an ethics problem, the drivers had not agreed to be part of the experiment.

 

[renormalize]

I did a quick look on Arxiv and did not see any of the, um, seasonal papers.....

How about these two from the General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology list:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22919
Feline gravity manipulation
Viktor T. Toth
Since their domestication at the dawn of civilization, cats have been known for their uncanny ability to seemingly defy gravity. We conjecture that this innate ability of cats is real: uniquely in the animal kingdom, felis catus, possibly along with a few closely related species, are indeed capable of manipulating their passive gravitational mass. We explore this idea in the context of both general relativity and quantum physics. We reach the intriguing conclusion that a close study of the behavior of cats in a gravitational field might shed light not only on the mechanism of neutrino mass mixing but perhaps even on the most fundamental question in theoretical physics: a satisfactory unification of the theory of gravitation and quantum field theory.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23126
pastamarkers 2: pasta sauce colormaps for your flavorful results
PASTA Collaboration, L. Rosignoli, A. Della Croce, E. Leitinger, L. Leuzzi, G. Papini, A. Traina, S. Sartori, N. Borghi, E. Ceccarelli
In the big data era of Astrophysics, the improvement of visualization techniques can greatly enhance the ability to identify and interpret key features in complex datasets. This aspect of data analysis will become even more relevant in the near future, with the expected growth of data volumes. With our studies, we aim to drive progress in this field and inspire further research. We present the second release of pastamarkers, a Python-based matplotlib package that we initially presented last year. In this new release we focus on big data visualization and update the content of our first release. We find that analyzing complex problems and mining large data sets becomes significantly more intuitive and engaging when using the familiar and appetizing colors of pasta sauces instead of traditional colormaps.

 

[diogenesNY]

How about these two from the General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology list:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22919
Feline gravity manipulation
Viktor T. Toth


https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23126

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23126

pastamarkers 2: pasta sauce colormaps for your flavorful results
PASTA Collaboration, L. Rosignoli, A. Della Croce, E. Leitinger, L. Leuzzi, G. Papini, A. Traina, S. Sartori, N. Borghi, E. Ceccarelli

Well done, sir! Great catch!

And I apologize for making a dog's breakfast out of the quote/formatting. My attempts to clean it up just seemed to make it worse. This is not an attempt at some recursive humor.... just a bit of late night textual bumbling.

 

[Klystron]

Apropos cats and feline gravity, with the benefit of many sisters and female cousins we raised many litters of kittens at home.

After acheiving independence from mother cat, kitties liked being held and would signal when they were ready to leap down to the ground, saving one from bending over. Cat received a higher view and chose an optimum landing spot.

Then eldest sister bought middle sister a Labrador puppy as a present. As middle sister was indifferent to canines, I assumed play activities with the soon-to-be gigantic frisky Lab. Based on cat protocol, the first time out I held the friendly pup at waist level and when he indicated he was ready to run on the lawn, gently released him.

Splat! Poor dog dropped like a sack of wet leaves with a stifled yelp and a reproachful look in his big puppy eyes. So I learned that cats control gravity but not dogs or humans.