Commas and Adjectives

Which version is best?

1. Both results involve markets where consumers have heterogeneous tastes and some, “small”, consumers buy just one good while other, “large”, consumers buy two.

versus

2. Both results involve markets where consumers have heterogeneous tastes and some, “small” consumers buy just one good while other, “large” consumers buy two.

versus

3. Both results involve markets where consumers have heterogeneous tastes and some “small” consumers buy just one good while other “large” consumers buy two.

I like version 1, because it replicates the pauses I would make when speaking. I don't know which the grammarians would choose.

"Beyond the planet of the crazygirls"

Tom Smith's "Beyond the planet of the crazygirls" has an odd beauty to it.

The Miktex Tex Processing Freeware Program

This is a post from 2005 that I'll copy here, with the old comments as part of the post.

The free Miktex (http://www.miktex.org/) looks to be an excellent latex and tex Windows processor program. I’ve been using SWP, and putting figures in looks to work better in Miktex. Miktex gets PDF’s right, which my version of SWP does not always do, and it processes straight from myfile.tex to myfile.pdf. On the other hand, it has some problems, noted below, which make it unhandier to use.

(1) I have a suggestion for the standard installation instructions: say more about the Windows command prompt. I haven’t used it for years, though I happened to remember it was in Accessories. Also, the user should know that he can change the default directory in teh command prompt to wherever he keeps his tex input files– say, d:/smith/latex-input, using the Properties (reachable by right clicking the command prompt).

(2) The command prompt requires you to type in all your commands, which is burdensome if they are long, e.g.,

pdflatex D:\_home\_HomeWD\INCOMING\FIGURECOPY/myfilewithalongname.tex

You can’t copy and paste in the usual way with CTRL-C and CTRL-V. What you can do, though is to copy to the clipboard with CTRL-C and then paste by rightclicking on the Command Prompt program and choosing PASTE.

I will put a comment line like this at the start of my tex files:

% pdflatex chap07_MoralHazard.tex

then I can copy all but the % part and paste it into the command prompt, and it will process chap07_MoralHazard.tex and write to chap07_MoralHazard.pdf

(3) Something better would be a graphic interface to replace the command prompt. I don’t know how to write such an interface, but here is what it would be: It would be simple: just a window in which the user could do two things:

1. Browse and choose a tex file to process, e.g., myfilewithalongname.tex, instead of having to type in the full name in the command prompt, and instead of having to have it in the command prompt’s directory.

2. Issue the processing command— most simply “latex myfilewithalongname.tex”, or “pdflatex”, or others that might be useful. There should be two to five choices, and the user would check the box of the command he wants to use.

The command would take the file from (1) and put the output in the same directory as the input.

The interface could be fancier, but that covers what the user needs every single time he uses Miktex, and it would save a lot of tricky typing.

(4) Miktex is fouled up by carriage returns, even ones that are not hard breaks. Thus, before I tex my files using it I need to strip off all the carriage returns, thus making all my equations, nicely separated into separate lines for visibility, into unreadable paragraphs. The solution, from Alan, the commentor below, is to make sure my input file is in UTF-8 Ascii, not ANSI. What I do in Textpad is (a) make sure it is set to UTF-8 as the standard encoding, (b) copy the entire file, and then close the file, (c) open a new file and paste what I copied, (d) save the new file with the old file’s name, on top of it. That converts from the ANSI coding I initially had to the UTF-8.

(5) The command which takes us straight from myfile.tex to the output myfile.pdf produces pdf files which are not crystal clear on the screen. The commands

latex -job-name=chap07_MoralHazard temp.tex dvips -Ppdf chap07_MoralHazard.dvi

do better, but then I can’t use JPG files in my input.

(7) Will I switch from SWP to Miktex? Money is not really a concern for me, but usability is. I’ll try it for a while and see.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 20th, 2005 at 7:26 am and is filed under Writing, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Edit this entry.

1. Alan Says: August 22nd, 2005 at 12:29 pm e

   Eric,

   I am not a user of SWP myself, but I do believe there are a number of ways in which SWP deviates from “standard” LaTeX (I’ve had these cause problems when sharing files with SWP users). MiKTeX, along with TeXLive, teTeX, and most other TeX distributions will have the same issues you describe here with respect to SWP. That said, allow me to attempt to address a few of your points:

   (2) and (3): I have rarely invoked LaTeX from the command line, whether using MiKTeX or another LaTeX distribution. Many, if not most, LaTeX users use an editor that handles the direct interaction with the LaTeX executable and friends. SWP is really nothing more than a very fancy LaTeX front-end. While the editors that most folks use are not as fancy, they do handle all of the command line work and make invoking LaTeX transparent to the user. Some popular Windows-friendly text editors than can be configured in this way are WinEdt (shareware), TeXnicCenter (freeware), and Emacs with appropriate plug- ins (open source), though there are a number of others.

   (4): Not sure why you’re experiencing problems with hard carriage returns. My files are chock full of them and MiKTeX handles them without complaint, so I suspect SWP is to blame here. Perhaps it is using an odd end-of-line character? Open one of your SWP files in a plain text editor (Notepad — but not Wordpad — will do) and see if it is read correctly, or if garbage appears at the end of the line. Alternatively, write a dummy LaTeX file with hard carriage returns using Notepad and see how it goes. Finally, I understand there’s a way to export files from SWP in a way that is supposed to make them more compatible with “standard” LaTeX systems — if true, you might try exporting your files in this manner before running them through MiKTeX.

   (5): The problem here is that pdfLaTeX is using Type 3 Postscript fonts instead of the more desirable Type 1 fonts. Since I don’t use pdfLaTeX myself, I can’t tell you for sure how to change it (though installing the cm-super package via the MiKTeX package manager might do the trick). A search of the usenet newsgroup comp.text.tex (via groups.google.com) should get you an answer pretty quickly, though.

   (6): MiKTeX does not recognize \tag because it is not part of standard LaTeX. To use it, you must call \usepackage{amsmath} in your preamble. Apparently, SWP does this for you whether you like it or not. Fortunately, amsmath is distributed with MiKTeX and virtually every other LaTeX distribution, so it should already be installed.

   (7): SWP insulates you from some of the low-level LaTeX drudgery at the cost of making your .tex files a little less portable. Another side-effect of this insulation is that you don’t always know what’s going on “behind the scenes,” as you saw when you tried to use the \tag command without \usepackage{amsmath}.

   Alan

2. Administrator Says: August 22nd, 2005 at 5:15 pm e

   Thanks!

   Adding \usepackage{amsmath} makes the tag command work again for equation special labelling.

   I still have the problem with line returns. It isn’t SWP– I actually write my latex files in Textpad, a text editor, and then used SWP only as a front-end— hence its inferiority to Miktex for me, since I don’t use most of SWP’s special features anyway. Also, the line return problem occurs when there are line returns in equations.

3. Administrator Says: August 22nd, 2005 at 7:19 pm e

   I updated the original post in light of Alan’s comments, so his comments won’t apply well any more.

4. Stefan Moebius Says: August 23rd, 2005 at 12:37 am e

   On (3): Maybe a tool modelled after OggDrop (http://www.vorbis.com/software.psp?pid=2) would be what you need? You just grab the .tex or .mp or .dvi file and drag it to a floating icon. Dropping it would invoke the correct program based on file type and configuration (e.g., pdflatex or latex).

5. Administrator Says: August 23rd, 2005 at 6:32 am e

   Yes, Stefan. Oggdrop is just for sound files, it seems. What would be a nice utility is a program that lets you say that any file dropped into an icon gets sent to the command line and processed using a particular command, with the output returned to the directory of the original file. I tries looking in the freeware site http://www.nonags.com/nonags/cl.html but couldn’t find such a thing.

6. Harald Oehlmann Says: August 23rd, 2005 at 7:52 am e

   I use Textpad too (but pdftex to generate postscript directly). You can invoke the pdftex processor from the editor by assigning for example Cntrl-1 to invoke latex. I use: Menue: Config->Settings:Extras -> Add Program and edit properties: Parameter: $File

7. Stefan Grosse Says: August 23rd, 2005 at 10:32 am e

   I also must say that using command prompt is a very unusual way for working with miktex. The perfect editor for me is winedt where you just have to push a button for texifying and pdf-texifying.

   With the carriage return- I noticed that there is a problem by opening a book chapter from your page. Winedt corrected it but I did not try to compile since there was a lot of scientific word stuff inside.

   If you like to use scientific workplace with miktex as LaTeX distro see the notes of Prof. Söderlind: http://home.tiscalinet.ch/paulsoderlind/Software/Software.html

   By the way the game trees do not look that great there is a package of Martin Osborn using pstricks to improve that: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~osborne/latex/index.html

8. Misha Says: August 23rd, 2005 at 10:52 am e

   Actually, I have another suggestion on how to improve MiKTeX. It takes relatively long to load all the definitions and packages every time TeX starts. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a running instance of TeX, that would remember all those .sty files. In this case, LaTeX would just invoke that process rather than loading the definitions again.

9. Administrator Says: August 23rd, 2005 at 5:25 pm e

   Thanks, everyone, for these very useful comments. Harald Oehlmann’s suggestion seems to work perfectly, though I had to set it up a bit differently than he suggested, perhaps because of my version of Textpad. Here is what I’ve just added to my latex notes in http://rasmusen.org/x/myfiles/latex-rasmusen.txt

   RUNNING MIKTEX FROM THE TEXTPAD TEXT EDITOR

   Harald Oehlmann told me how to do this. Here are precise instructions for running miktex from Textpad 4.7.3. Maybe other text editors have similar features.

   1. Click on Configure, then Preferences, then Tools.

   2. In Tools, click ADD, then choose DOS Command. A box will appear, and write “pdflatex a file” as a title for the tool. Then click APPLY.

   3. Click on the + sign next to Tools. Several tool titles will appear, including your new “pdflatex a file”. Click on it, and a Properties box will appear with various things for you to type in.

   4. Under Parameters, type in “pdflatex $File”. Make sure that under Initial Folder,there is $FileDir. Make sure none of the options boxes are checked, including CAPTURE OUTPUT. Click OK when you’re done.

   5. Load a tex file into Textpad. To process it, click on Tools from the front set of headings (File, Edit, Search, View, Tools, … ) Then click on “pdflatex a file”, which you will have added.

   6. The Command Prompt window will appear, and the tex file in textpad will be processed. The PDF file will be generated as output.

   I hope I didn’t miss any steps.

10. Bob Says: August 27th, 2005 at 5:36 am e

    First, hello Eric, from the distant past. We knew each other at MIT.

    Here’s another simple way to compile a .tex file using the MikTeX texify command. (I have to admit I live at the command prompt. Just a matter of preference. I also live in Emacs!) I turn .tex into .pdf using this batch file:

    texify %1.tex dvips -tletter -Ppdf -G0 %1 call ps2pdf13 %1.ps %1.pdf

    You put these commands in a file called “makepdf.bat”, and place the file somewhere in your path. Then if you have a .tex file called “foo.tex”, at the command prompt you type

    makepdf foo

    and you will end up with a pdf version of your document.

11. bob wolfe Says: September 17th, 2005 at 6:53 pm e

    Eric,

    I used to be an avid fan of SWP. I now use Miktex.

    1) I used to run into problems with carriage returns. They all arose when I shared files with colleagues who used UNIX. They have now all switched away from UNIX (despite them calling me all kinds of nasty names a decade ago for using Windows) so the problem is now fixed.

    2) SWP is not standard. I use a lot of math. \mbox does not work right in SWP. That prevented me from sharing with lots of colleagues who use standard latex. I think there are other things that are not standard in SWP. That makes it a pain to collaborate.

    3) SWP consultants used to have an attitude. Maybe the attitude is now fixed, so I apologize for any aspersions suggested by these comments. When I asked for work arounds on how to solve the problem of working with colleagues who use standard latex, the SWP consultants were extremely defensive in their responses. Not vulgar, but close to it. Almost as bad as the Apple community used to be towards Windows users.

    4) The real raison d’etre for SWP is its integration with Maple. Beautiful. Wonderful. I love the concept. Maple does simple math very well, up to algebra and closed form calculus. It does not do hard problems well at all, such as infinite sums. So, you have to do the math to see if it is right anyway, and then it is about as easy to type it in yourself in latex as to use the simplify verbs available in maple. If you are teaching calc 101 or high school algebra, then SWP is great. If you are teaching quantitative graduate courses, then be careful with SWP.

12. Maciej Radziejewski Says: September 27th, 2005 at 1:46 am e

    Your idea of having a simple IDE (point (3) of your original post) is already implemented in Windows! Well, almost.

    You can browse your files using Windows Explorer. Then you can compile (texify) by right-clicking a TeX file and selecting an appropriate command from the context menu. You just have to define a context menu action for .tex files. I usually define “Latex”, but you may prefer to use pdfLatex or to call some batch file for more complex processing.

    Defining actions takes some knwoledge and it may be a good idea to suggest it to Christian Schenk to do it in the installer as an option (if it is not already there). You can define actions using the “file types” tab (in WinXP accessible from the explorer window - Tools - Options) or using regedit (dangerous if you misuse it).

13. Eric Wilson Says: January 31st, 2006 at 6:38 am e

    Maybe I’m missing something here. Why not use WinEdt? It’s a great editor, designed particularly for LaTeX. TexShop is ok for macs.

A Contraction for "Here are"

I was just writing an email and wrote "Here's my notes." Since "notes" is plural, that's incorrect, and I should say "Here are my notes." A contraction fit the spirit of the email better, though. In speech, I say, "Here're my notes." I wonder if other people do? If they do, then "Here're" is a legitimate contraction.

Punctuation: The Possessive of Lists

The rule for punctuation of the possessive of items in a list is that you put the "'s" only after the last item (source, e.g. this site). Thus: "I went to John and Mary's house." That sounds right. How about this? "I went to John, Mary, Joe, Andrew, and Matilda's house." That sounds right too.

Science Fiction as Prior Art

In 1934, Heinlein was discharged from the Navy due to pulmonary tuberculosis. During a lengthy hospitalization, he developed the concept of the waterbed, and his detailed descriptions of it in three of his books constituted sufficient prior art to prevent a US patent on water beds when they became common in the 1960s[9].

(from Wikipedia, Robert Heinlein. Footnote 9 is to a WSJ article)

A Good Sentence on Rescuing Banks

I liked this sentence from Prof. Buiter's blog, both in sound and sentiment:

I will refute his argument, focusing mainly on the case against bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, unless this involves the euthanasia of the existing shareholders of the two GSEs and a material haircut for their creditors.

DEFINING YOUR OWN COUNTERS AND LABELS in Latex

From my latex notes at http://rasmusen.org/a/latex-rasmusen.txt

This is tricky in Latex, because while you can define new counters, I can't see how you would attach their values to labels. The \label command can only be used in environments that have their own counters (such as \begin{equation}), and you can't fool those environments into adding to a counter without having them print the value on the printed page somewhere. So I used Tex programming, like this. I create a new counter named \fignum and then attach it to a label called \1f, \2f, and so forth, advancing the counter in between. I used \edef rather than \def because \edef inserts the value at the particular time, while \def would repeat the command \number\fignum each time \1f was written.

\newcount\fignum\fignum=1

\edef\1f{\number\fignum}

\advance\fignum by 1

\edef\2f{\number\fignum}

Example: Figure \1f says this. The second part of it, Figure \1fa, says something different. Figures \2f and \2f-a say something still different.

This is plain Tex, not Latex.

You need to write backslash-1-f rather than backslash-f-1. I'm not sure why-- it must be that the number gets interpreted as doing something special to the definition rather than being part of the name.

You have to remember to put your definitions earlier in the document than when you use the term defined. You could put them all the start, actually, but then you might forget to re-order them when you change the order of the diagrams.

I think you can advance the fignum variable by a negative number if you want to.

Some Literary Words and Phrases

Here are two phrases I came across recently:

"Augustan redundancy in writing"

"adjectives are noun hungry"

From http://theliterarylink.com/definitions.html come some literary terms:

Anaphora: A repetition device wherein the same expression (word or words) is repeated at the beginning of two or more lines, clauses, or sentences. "When Jamie saw him throw the baby, saw Van throw the little baby, saw Van throw his little sister Nin, then they moved.

Litotes: this is when you understate an idea in order to convey the opposite idea. This is normally done through the use of a negative negative before one of the words in order to express a strong affirmative.

Metonymy: Like synecdoche, this term refers to figurative language that uses particular words to represent something else with which they are associated. Metonymy is when one term is substituted for another term with which it is closely associated ("crown" or "sceptre" stands duty for "monarch").

Trope: Any of several types of diversion from the literal to the figurative. The so-called "four master tropes" are irony, metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche) A few new ones have recently been invented: see aegis, catachresis, kenosis, perruque. cf figures of speech.

Co-opting Your Opponent's Issues

Steve Teles talked about a good idea in a conference here last weekend: the idea of going on one's opponent's issue ground in politics and beating him on his own terms. His paper was on Compassionate Conservatism. Here are perhaps other examples. The paradigm is:

"Liberals say X helps Y, but X actually hurts them."

1. X = Immigration, Y = Mexican-Americans

2. X= the minimum wage, Y = poor people

3. X= easy divorce laws, Y = women

4. X= low penalties for crime, Y = blacks

5. X= unions, Y = workers

We need a good name for this tactic. It is not the same as Co-Opting, really, or Issue Stealing

Italics and Asterisks

For emphasis, I wonder if *asterisks* might be better than italics. They convey different impressions; that is certain. Asterisks are more masculine, more heavy-hitting, which is sometimes but not always desirable. For titles of books, however, asterisks are all wrong, since there emphasis is not desirable. Write not *Huckleberry Finn*, but Huckleberry Finn.

A Short Speech and a Bye-Ku. Stromata Blog has two good entries. One is an all-purpose stump speech from one of Mark Steyn's readers:

My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you’ll join with me as we try to change it.

The other is an original bye-ku for Dennis Kucinich as he drops out of the presidential race:

He could have gone far
if that saucer had landed
little green voters.

Poetry to Memorize. Jough Dempsey has a good poetry page, good both for its selection of memorizable poems, for its poems as poems, and for his commentary.

One of the best aspects of learning a poem by heart is that you get to take a poem inside of yourself. It becomes a part of you. That sounds touchy-feely, but it’s true. When you memorize a poem it is no longer just a poem, but your poem. It’s in your head, and you can call it up from memory as you would any other experience.

He has “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost, “For Whom The Bell Tolls” by John Donne, “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden, “Tears, Idle Tears” by Alfred Lord Tennyson. They aren't easy to memorize, but they are good poems.

Penmanship. A good page on penmanship, featuring scans of old instruction books, is "Lessons in Calligraphy and Penmanship" . I was looking for a cursive alphabet page for my daughter and couldn't find any page that had all the letters in cursive upper and lower case in beautiful handwriting. "ALPHABET PRACTICE - WRITING WORKSHEETS" has good dotted worksheets for all-caps or all-small and for individual letters repeated over a page that are at least acceptable in quality.

Armamentarium 1: the equipment and methods used, esp. in medicine 2: matter available or utilized for an undertaking or field of activity--"a whole armamentarium of devices"

HTML-Expanding Thumbnail Images. Highslide is javascript for putting a thumbnail image to show up in your HMTL page and for another, larger, file, to appear if it's clicked upon. (Click here to read more.)

It's freeware for noncommercial use. The instructions are not very clear, but I got it to work without too much trouble. Here are my instructions:

1. Download the zip file.

2. Unzip it.

3. Upload the "highfile" directory to the top directory of your weblog. In my case, with Blogger, this is the same directory where I have blogger.html and index.html, and it is not the root directory for my server.

4. Save one version of your graphic file with full quality (say, 1012kb) and another with lower quality but faster to load for the thumbnail which shows up first (say, 24kb).

5. Don't put the entire code into your weblog entry. Blogger objects to having things like html, head, body, there. Instead, put in something like my example: http://rasmusen.org/t/images-2007/highfile.example.txt. What it looks like as a blog entry is here.

6. Or, change your Blogger template, which as the css style file as part of its file, by inserting http://rasmusen.org/t/images-2007/highfile.example3.txt in the style section of it. Then you can leave the style parts out of each blog entry, just using a blog entry like http://rasmusen.org/t/images-2007/highfile.example2.txt.

I've also done this for Wordpress. There, the css file in step 6 is inserted in the Style Sheet. The highfile directory in step 3 is loaded up to some wordpress directory. I put up duplicates to make sure, to the top directory and to the wp-content one where the index.htm file is.

I changed the code slightly. I deleted the height parameter, because if you have both a height and a width parameter the image is fit into that thumbnail space and distorted. Some people might want that, though.

Negative Reviews and Inframarginal Subsidies for Investment. MR emailed me recently asking me to look at part of a review by RM of his recent book. As you can see, the review says the book's theory is "remarkable", quotes at length including a diagram, and then implies that the theory is wrong, without saying why. (Click here to read more.)

MR wondered if he and his co-author had made some obvious mistake and if I'd explain it to him.

I was equally puzzled, though. Maybe they should have used a numerical example. Suppose that a Japanese company invests 10 billion yen because it has to pay a 4% interest rate to borrow the money in the private financial markets and the last yen of those 10 billion invested would have a return of 4%. If they invested another billion yen, they'd only get 3%, having to go to worse projects, so they don't. But then the Japanese government offers to lend them the 10 billion at an interest rate of 2%. They eagerly take up the offer of course. But they still don't invest more than 10 billion. If they invested another billion by borrowing at 4% from the private sector, they'd still only get a 3% return and they'd lose money. Thus, government lending meant to increase investment won't succeed unless the government lends more than a private company was originally borrowing. Put more technically, this is an example of how inframarginal price changes have zero effect on real behavior.

That idea is correct, unless I'm missing something big, and it looks to me as if the explanation above is correct too. Am I missing anything?

I think there are two morals to the story. First, simple Chicago-style price theory really is remarkable. It can surprise even an experienced, much-published economist. Second, when criticizing someone's ideas in print it's a good idea to send a copy to them to see if they have a response you hadn't thought of.

December 2: Someone suggested that even an inframarginal subsidy would increase investment via its effect on the probability of bankruptcy. A firm which has a subsidy will be more profitable, and hence less likely to go bankrupt, and hence will be able to borrow more cheaply, and hence will invest more. That sounds right. A lump sum subsidy would have the same effect.

Is Not Necessarily Equal To

At lunch at Nuffield I was just asking MM about some math notation I'd like: a symbol for "is not necessarily equal to". For example, and economics paper might show the following:

Proposition: Stocks with equal risks might or might not have the same returns. In the model's notation, x IS NOT NECESSARILY EQUAL TO y.

Click here to read more

I can't say x \neq y there, because maybe x=y, maybe not, depending on the parameter values.

If anybody knows of such a symbol, please let me know. In fact, just a symbol for IS NOT NECESSARILY might be useful, since we could combine it with other symbols, e.g.

x IS NOT NECESSARILY = y

Horse heights ARE NOT NECESSARILY > cow heights

The biased estimator IS NOT NECESSARILY \sim N(0,1).

OCTOBER 7. Stimulated by a comment below: The modal logic symbols might work well. Wikipedia's "Modal logic" says: "The basic modal operators are usually written (or L) for Necessarily and (or M) for Possibly."

Maybe I could say " x ≠ y" for "x is not necessarily equal to y".

Shoulder Muscles and Handwriting

"Tips for improving your handwriting," by Dyas A. Lawson sounds worth trying.Click here to read more

Here's it's idea for improving one's handwriting:

I’ve found only one reference to using the right muscle groups to write, and this is critical. I can’t be the only person who knows this; I’m neither that smart nor that good. Calligraphy instruction books address hand position, desk position, lighting, paper, you name it--but for some reason, not using the right muscles.

As you’ve probably surmised, the "right muscles" are not those in the fingers. You must use the shoulder-girdle and forearm muscles. This muscle group is capable of much more intricate action than you think and tires much less easily than fingers, besides giving a smooth, clean, sweeping look to the finished writing. Though it seems paradoxical, since we’re accustomed to thinking of small muscles having better control, the shoulder-girdle group, once trained, does the job better.