About
Where a harmless question accidentally turns into a paper.
Every so often a question grabs me by the collar. Not an important one, heaven forbid. Nobody is waiting for the answer, no funding body is lurking in the background, no committee convenes, no one will ever be promoted for it. It is merely a question so outrageously stubborn that the only way to be rid of it is to write several pages at it until one of the two parties gives up. (Usually the question. Sometimes me.)
So I let myself fall down a rabbit hole and write it all down. Then the next one. This site is the pile that accumulates along the way: meticulously kept, utterly purposeless. What is it all for? Nothing. That is not an accident, that is the concept.
Everything here is researched with real, faintly intrusive thoroughness and a guaranteed zero consequences. Treat it as the lab notebook of a curiosity that broke out of quarantine at some point and was never recaptured. There are plenty of footnotes anyway, not because they are needed, but because they look so pretty.
In short: over-thorough answers to questions nobody asked. Enjoy them, contradict them loudly, forward them to someone who also didn't ask. Just do not cite them. These are not that kind of paper, and I am, with all due respect, very much not that kind of researcher.
Why "not quotable"?
Peer-reviewed by no one, proofread by the question itself. The care is real; the significance is entirely made up. Should one of these documents ever end up in your bibliography, that is a matter solely between you and your conscience.
“Unreasonably thorough answers to questions nobody asked.”