Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

In Taipei, instead of drinking fountains they have water dispensers (sometimes hot water) with these flattenable paper cups.

(I can’t find “flattenable” in Google’s dictionaries, but the word gets 848 hits, so it’s not exactly a neologism. We need the word, anyway.)

There are three ways to do comments in Latex.

1. The standard way to do comments puts in % and then everything on the
line after it is commented out:

Say $y = x^2 + \beta$. %Here is a comment.

2. If you put \usepackage{verbatim} at the start of your file, you can
do multiline comments like this:

\begin{comment}
Here is the first line of the comment.
Here is the second line.
Here is the third.
\end{comment}

3.If you put \newcommand{\comments}[1]{} at the start of your file, you
can have the best way of all:

Say $y = x^2 + \beta$.\comments{Here is my comment. }

Note that if you use \usepackage{verbatim}, it creates an odd
command that makes everything after it in the file a comment. Suppose
you write:

\comment{Here is what I wanted to be my comment.} Here is some more
writing for my paper.

Then not only will the words in the brackets be a comment, but all the
words after the brackets and on the next lines and pages too.

align= left width= "240" >

Note the cement slots on the wall, put there to hold air conditioners. I haven’t seen that elsewhere than Taipei.

Here are some observations from my trip to Taipei, Formosa:

1. Lots of the balconies are barred in, even though crime is now low.
2. Bicycles are usually locked, but often to themselves and with thin cables.
3. A surprising number of people speak English, and good English too. Not all taxi drivers do, though.
4.Instead of drinking fountains, there are water dispensers (hot and cold) which use paper cups that you open up from being flat.
5.There are not vending machine for drink everywhere, as you would find in Japan.
6. The department stores are very expensive, except for their food.
7. Restaurants are not particularly cheap.
8. People are very friendly.
9. The vegetation is lush and beautiful.
10. There are wide main roads. There are lots of trees planted too.
11. Motorcycles are everywhere- more of them than bikes.
12. The streets are labelled in English. So is the produce and meat in random grocery stores!
13. There are wild mountains in the middle of the city. The city extends for miles, with no single center or single rich area. It is like Los Angeles in both those ways.
14. I didn’t notice any factories.
15. On Sundays, lots of motorcycles had mama in back, daddy driving, and a child in front of him.
16. Ming pottery really is a lot better than what came before or after. New techniques were discovered, but used simply.

The sociology of global warming continues to puzzle me. Claims for it are wildly exaggerated. At the same time, however, I hardly ever see mentioned two of the strongest arguments on the pro-action side, to wit:

1. Temperature increases have been concentrated in the interiors of Asia and North America in winter. This is significant, because if increased carbon dioxide is the cause, warming would be strongest where there is the least water vapor– interior land masses with cold dry air. That’s a lot stronger evidence than just the correlation with increased CO2 levels. (Has anyone applied sophisticated time series techniques to that correlation, by the way? Maybe non-economists don’t know those techniques.)

2. There is some possibility of a catastrophic cycle of increased warming, turning the Earth into another Venus. Posner has emphasized this, I hear, in his book. That is much more serious than a few degrees of extra heat, even if less probable.

That these two things get so little play makes me wonder about the judgement of the pro-action people. But it means they may be even more correct than they think, too.

I notice something interesting from passages in Hebrews preached on at St. Ebbe’s today. Hebrews 2 has Jesus saying words that are from Psalms and Isaiah, and that the Holy Ghost said Psalm 95. These passages are more relevant to the issue of the internal claims to authority of scripture than the famous Timothy “God-breathed” passage so often quoted. Here is the first passage: (more…)