In Which I Accidentally Publish a Scientific Paper

Crowdecks was basically finished.

Again.

This is becoming a recurring theme.

There were projects. There was a graveyard for projects that had met unfortunate ends. There were writings. There was a development diary.

Everything had somewhere to live.

Except, apparently, the things that didn't.

Because I have quite a lot of ideas that aren't actually projects.

Some are things I might make one day. Some are observations that have sent me wandering down completely unnecessary intellectual rabbit holes. Some are solutions to problems nobody has asked me to solve.

They weren't dead, so I couldn't bury them.

They weren't really projects, because in many cases I had absolutely no intention of doing anything about them.

They were just...

There.

So we made another book.

Concepts.

A nice ethereal-looking thing where all the strange little thoughts floating around my brain could finally be deposited somewhere other than my brain.

Excellent.

This should clear out the backlog nicely.

Unfortunately, giving my ideas somewhere to live had roughly the same effect as opening a cupboard you haven't looked inside for three years.

Things started falling out.

Roibot Accessories.

Social Synchronisation.

Shoulder Bastard, the judgemental AI food auditor who notices that I ate the crisps I mysteriously forgot to log.

And then there was the thing about summer sleep.

I'd noticed for years that I sleep differently in summer. Lighter. More fragmented. More easily disturbed.

Daylight was the obvious explanation.

Except I started wondering whether pollen might be involved.

Not because I have hay fever.

Because histamine is involved in wakefulness.

This was originally supposed to be another Concepts entry.

A mildly interesting hypothesis. Write it down. Add it to the book. Move on.

Instead, Roi and I started looking at the science.

Then we looked at some more science.

Then considerably more science.

Then we started trying to break the idea.

And annoyingly, it wouldn't entirely break.

There were gaps. There were assumptions. There were things that absolutely needed testing.

But the underlying biological pathway was plausible enough that what had begun as:

"Huh. I wonder if pollen keeps me awake?"

turned into a properly researched scientific hypothesis.

At which point there was really only one sensible thing to do.

Publish it.

So we did.

On Zenodo.

With a DOI.

Crowdecks had somehow progressed from a website documenting my tendency to enthusiastically start things and then wander off...

...to generating an actual scientific paper.

This was not in the original specification.

Still, the hypothesis now exists somewhere considerably more respectable than inside my head, which is probably for the best.

And the Concepts book works beautifully.

Everything has somewhere to go.

No more loose ideas floating around demanding that I remember them.

Excellent.

We must surely be nearly finished now.