Today (April 1st) on arXiv:astro-ph 🐟
(just a small sample)

Cats are known to be a topic of choice on this day (see, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.17058v2), so let's start with them.

- "Catsteroseismology: Survey-based Analysis of Purr-mode Oscillations Suggests Inner Lives of Cats are Unknowable", provide methods to measure the fundamental purrameters of cats using "purr-modes" and “growl-modes".

link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23560v1

1/4

My cat Chester's dynamical systems analysyyyyy7777777777777777y7is of the laser pointer and the red dot on the wall: correlation, causation, or SARS-Cov-2 hallucination?

My cat Chester investigates the elusive relationship between the appearance in my hand of a silver laser pointer and that of a red dot on the wall, or on the floor, or on any other object that resides within the vicinity of the laser pointer. Chester first assesses preliminary establishments for causality, including mutual information, temporal precedence, and control for third variables. These assessments are all inconclusive for various reasons. In particular, mutual information fails to illuminate the problem due to a dearth of information regarding what the laser pointer might have been doing at times following Chester's first awareness of the dot. Next Chester performs a formal reconstruction of phase space via time-delay embedding, to unfold the gggggggggggfffgfgtredvteometry ,mmmm.........,.,,......,.mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm of the underlying dynamical system giving rise to the red dot's trajectory. The resulting attractor does not resemble a laser pointer. The reconstruction could, however, be flawed, for example, due to the short temporal duration of the dot's observed trajectory. Finally, the red dot could be a hallucination: a symptom brought on by COVID-19 - because, well, these days pretty much anything might be a symptom brought on by COVID-19. On this note, Chester's kitten brother Mad Dog Lapynski offers an independent check on the red dot's existence. Moreover, the results of this study are inconclusive and ca[pokilki[[[[[ll for follow-up.

arXiv.org

- "Feline gravity manipulation", introduces a Modified Feline Gravitational Dynamics (MOFEGD) which could explain how cats can change their masses, providing answers to fundamental question.

link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22919v1

2/4

Feline gravity manipulation

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.

arXiv.org

- "All about Cookies: The perfect compromise between softness and crispiness", I mean... I will definitely try to replicate the methods provided in this article.

link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23114v1

3/4

All about Cookies: The perfect compromise between softness and crispiness

Cookies are enjoyed best when they are both crispy and soft. I investigate in which proportion the cookies are crispy and soft, and disentangle whether it makes them biscuits, cakes, or none of the above. I baked cookies for colleagues at KTH, Stockholm, and University of Geneva, Switzerland, adopting my mum's mum's mum's etc. recipe. I created a dedicated survey for my colleagues with three well-selected questions to answer while eating one cookie. The weighted-average mean of the crispiness and softness, weighted by the respective enjoyment of the cookie, over the whole population amount to 7.0 +/- 1.1 and 5.3 +/- 1.4, respectively. The enjoyment of the cookies amounts to 9.1 +/- 2.3. People like (my) cookies, and cookies are neither cakes, nor biscuits, they are just... cookies!

arXiv.org

- "pastamarkers 2: pasta sauce colormaps for your flavorful results", probably the best matplotlib colormap to go with the markers released last year (that has been updated; however I'm not sure the colormaps are very accessible with colorblindness).

link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23126v1
repo: https://github.com/LR-inaf/pasta-marker

That's it for today. Maybe some (more serious?) work soon...

4/4

pastamarkers 2: pasta sauce colormaps for your flavorful results

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.

arXiv.org