A collection · 3 papers
Œuvres & Curiosités
A curated anthology of collected papers — some in earnest, some gloriously satirical — set with the care of a mathematics journal. Filed, sealed, and numbered like the leather-bound volume this pretends to be.
On the Necessity of Complex Numbers in the Theory of Luxury Pricing: A Spectral Approach to "Price on Demand"
We prove that the classical real-valued theory of pricing is insufficient to describe the behavior of luxury goods, and that any consistent model must be defined over the complex field . We introduce the Veblen residue, demonstrate that the phrase "Price on Demand" corresponds to a pole of order one at the point at infinity on the Riemann sphere of desire, and establish the Fundamental Theorem of Luxury: every non-constant luxury price has at least one root in the consumer's solvency.
Emoji as Transport Protocol
This paper proposes a semi-serious model in which emoji in modern instant messaging are not merely pictograms of emotion, but may instead be understood as a set of lightweight control signals within the human social protocol stack. Using network models including TCP, UDP, QUIC, WebSocket, Server-Sent Events, WebRTC and MQTT, we analyse how common emoji such as 👀, 👍, 🤡, 💀 and 🫠 perform functions including connection establishment, acknowledgement, state synchronisation, tone marking, error handling and session resumption. We further propose a fictional Emoji Pragmatic Layer and discuss the properties of emoji with regard to high semantic density, low transmission cost, contextual dependence and protocol ambiguity. Our findings suggest that, in a surprisingly large number of scenarios, 👀 behaves suspiciously like SYN, PING, SUBSCRIBE or SESSION_RESUME, while 💀 may reasonably be modelled as 500 Internal Human Error. This paper makes no claim of compliance with any IETF, IEEE, ACM or normal-human-behaviour specification.
From “Cosmic Energy” to `insufficient evidence`: How I Gradually Learned to Give Abstraction a Type System 🧠📚
This essay traces how training in writing, mathematics, and physics gradually turned boundaryless abstraction into models that can be defined, expanded, inspected, and updated. Beginning with the small debugger “What does that mean, concretely?”, it examines argument structure, premises and evidence, experience and authority, falsifiability, communication across different backgrounds, and when to stop a conversation with no convergence condition. Its central claim is not that abstraction or intuition should be rejected, but that abstraction should have a schema, intuition should carry a confidence level, and every model should retain an update path.