October 9 2025. I went out to look at the moon around 2:40am on 中秋 and I couldnt find it. I realized I had come out too late and the moon was probably close to setting, so next year I will come out earlier. Today I also randomly had this idea that people might have evolved an instinct to "suck in" their lips under certain typse of physical exertion to protect their teeth. I noticed that sometimes I unconsciously did this lip sucking action when rushing down the stairs, or in mid air after jumping. Surely there must be some other people with this behavior, although I don't know how pervasive it is. Intuitively it makes sense to me, since humans don't seem to have any other mechanisms to protect their teeth and being able to eat is pretty important. I talked briefly with gpt5 about it and it gave me a name for the action as AU28 in the facial action coding system (facs), which is a pretty neat system that I was delighted to learn about. It suggested I phrase it as something like "We propose that the common lip-tuck (AU28) observed during exertion represents an instinctive dento-protective bracing reflex…". According to its research, nobody had made this point before. I was skeptical but it could be the case that nobody really pointed it out yet. I don't want to go and do the work of finding like 30 people to collect data on then carrying out experiments and writing it up and pouring through the data and making pretty figures and going through the back and forths of peer review and stuff. My last paper is under review at physical review letters and I am not really looking forward to getting a revise or having it rejected and needing to edit it for another journal. I feel done with it and honestly I'm kind of thinking about letting it just sit on arxiv if it gets rejected, because I don't really want to rewrite it anymore.
I discovered this journal called Medical Hypotheses which seems to have the idea of publishing wild speculation that is at least somewhat scientically sound. I quite like the idea of it, although it doesn't have much of a reputation, which doesn't really concern me since I won't be going through academia anyways. There's a lot of ideas that just exist in some private correspondences or conversations or in people's heads that never really get widely circulated for all kinds of reasons. Some early work on prions and nobel prize winning stuff was first predicted here, but they also accepeted lots of fringe and crackpot work.
I wish there were some better way to have it on the record for scientific specuulation without going through the full motions of verifying things. At least from my time in quantum information, I saw a lot of people out there who were quite content with just looking for pieces of theory to implement experimentally. Although I think most people with this mindset are juniors who don't really have any idea what to do. Just yesterday I skimmed through a paper simulating some topological phase of matter on a superconducting processor, I talked with the corresponding author once like a year and a half ago, his lab is huge, and they publish often. They already had the hardware mostly working and his horde of students were pretty good with all the tricks and alchemy used to get all kinds of experiments on it to work in practice, so they were churning out papers of the sort quite rapidly. This particular experiment was published in Nature. It was certainly novel and very few groups besides them could have pulled it off, but it was still sweatshop work.