Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

I am unhappy with WordPress for various reasons, so I’m trying out Google’s Blogger. For a while I will be posting at http://www.rasmusen.org/t instead.

I received a rejection letter recently that puzzles me. My co- authors and I don’t really see how the criticisms below apply to our paper, apart from the single spacing and not citing any articles from that journal. We would welcome any comments. Don’t worry about being overly frank. We are especially interested in whether Empirical Finance has some customary style we are not following. Here is the paper’s abstract:

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Peggy Noonan’s “Now He Tells Us: If only they’d listened to Greenspan! And they might have, if only he’d spoken clearly” is good on how the former Fed chairman has saved his criticism of pork barrel spending for his book rather than making it when it might have actually stopped the spending:

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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.

I was just giving advice to my student Changmin Lee about going on the American academic job market. Some of the advice I’ll want to repeat, so I’ll put it here. If every foreign student takes this advice, it will help the market work a lot better. And it is a good illustration of how to apply game theory thinking to real-world situations.

1. On your curriculum vitae (resume), put somewhere “A recording of me speaking English is available at http:/www.iu.edu/jkjkjk.mp3, and a movie of me teaching is available at http:/www.iu.edu/jkjkjk.mov.”

You might want to omit the movie, but for a foreign student the recording is crucial. Think of it this way. For Korean students, the employer’s prior is that the job applicant can’t speak English well enough to be worth looking at seriously. You need to provide information to possibly change that belief.

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Here are some good words from German:

In the utterly abstract field of quantum physics, Erwin Schrödinger coined the term of “Verschränkung” – most closely translated into English as entanglement – for little parts that, though far from one another, always keep the exact same distance from each other. But unlike the English term, the German word tells me right away what is meant. Einstein described the confusion of “Verschränkung” succinctly: It must have to do with a “spukhafte Fernwirkung,” most closely translated as “long-distance ghostly effect”

Windows is awesomely bad. How can as big a company as Microsoft do things so poorly? I do not mean that rhetorically. Rather, why don’t they spend a little more money and make a far better product, for which they could charge more? I suppose Bill Gates must be blamed– he controls the company, and he must not have a good feel for technology and so doesn’t understand why good design matters. There is not market corrective for the problem of a monopolistic leader who fails to see something imoprtant. This matters for policy purposes, because such incompetence only survives because of a government-granted monopoly— copyright and patent on software.

Here’s an example, which I’ll list so I can use it as a standard reference. What matters is not that this is so important to operation, as that it shows such incompetence in design.

I want to cancel all my print jobs, because one job is jamming the printer for some reason. Windows has a window that shows print jobs and supposedly allows the user to cancel any one of them, but as often as not, that command is ignored by the computer. Probably that’s incompetent design too, but let’s give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt– maybe there is some technical reason why some print jobs can’t be cancelled without restarting the machine. So I went to the Web.

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Hyponatremia is a useful word I learned from GN of Uni ’76. Wendy Bumgardner says

A study of Boston Marathon runners found that 13% had drunk too much water and developed hyponatremia – a dangerous and deadly dilution of their blood. The study was published in the April 14, 2005 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

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C.H. of Uni ’76 says:

I would recommend the Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate as a good (cheap) standard dictionary for those descriptivists among us (the big 2nd and 3rd Internationals from the same publisher are good, too, but really BIGGGGG). Random House’s 2nd Unabridged is pretty great, too, and kind of encyclopedic to boot. And the American Heritage collegiate is the only one to have when you’re prescribing usage for more than one word. They’re the William Safire of lexicographers.

“Dum loquor hora fugit,” is in the main courtroom of the Ohio Supreme Court (something you should see if you visit Columbus). It means, roughly, “While you’re talking the hours are fleeing.” That’s funny, since each side has exactly 30 minutes to present its case, with a timer to keep track.

I found an interesting website with See: examples of trying to translate Nietzsche’s maxims.

Hat man sein warum? des Lebens, so verträgt man sich fast mit jedem wie? – Der Mensch strebt nicht nach Glück; nur der Engländer thut das.

Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does. (Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows,” #12)

I’d seen that as

Man does not live for pleasure; only the Englishman does. (Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows,” #12)

Though less accurate, I like the mistranslation better.

It’s common for liberals to call any political group they don’t like, “right-wing” or “conservative”. The Nazis as conservatives are an example. The National SOCIALIST party complained about rich people, were anti-Christian, wanted stronger government control, and had no interest in restoring the Kaiser or any other German government system that had ever existed. They were anti-Stalinist, but so, of course, were the Trotskyites. Similarly, in the 1980′s we used to hear about Kremlin conservatives and conservative Maoists— by then, even the Communists were honorary conservatives to liberals.

I came across a funny example of that in a column about India by Martha Nussbaum.

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Which is the best way to write this proposition?

(1) “If x =2z, then y = 3z; and if x =2v, then y = 3g.”

(2) “If x =2z then y = 3z, and if x =2v then y = 3g.”

(3) “If x =2z, then y = 3z and if x =2v, then y = 3g.”

(4) “If x =2z, then y = 3z, and if x =2v, then y = 3g.”

Professor VOlokh says:

A “conclusory argument,” I pointed out, is an argument that is long on conclusions and short on supporting evidence; “conclusive evidence,” on the other hand, is evidence that points persuasively to a certain conclusion.

That sounds like a useful word, one that deserves to be better known.

There are lots of poems and songs about romantic love. That makes sense; it is a powerful emotion and one commonly experienced. Why aren’t there poems and songs about mother-love? It has drama, power, and commonality too.

From The Herald:

Greenspan mocked his own speaking style in 1988 when he said: “I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I said.”

I saw someone intelligent make a mistake based on not knowing this writing rule, so I looked up a source on it:

Use an in place of a when it precedes a vowel sound, not just a vowel. That means it’s “an honor” (the h is silent), but “a UFO” (because it’s pronounced yoo eff oh).

Most of the confusion with a or an arises from acronyms and other abbreviations: some people think it’s wrong to use an in front of an abbreviation like “MRI” because “an” can only go before vowels. Not so: the sound, not the letter, is what matters. Because you pronounce it “em ar eye,” it’s “an MRI.”

(http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/a.html)

I had an invitation to write an entry for the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, 2nd edition, but declined it when I found that they require gender-neutered writing. They wouldn’t allow a sentence such as, “If a player in the game is informed, he will never react in that way.” It’s interesting how politicized academic writing has become– and how many academics implicitly condemn everything written before 1990 as insufficiently supportive of feminism.

G. P. N. emailed the Uni list with a very nice collection of words at the same time obscure, striking, and likely to be useful some day:

liminal : marginally perceptible

threnody A poem or song of mourning or lamentation.

steatopygic or steatopygian With an extreme accumulation of fat on the buttocks. “Related and much more useful is calypigian – beautiful hips, and someone proposed cacopygian, ugly ones.” See this discussion.

marmoreal: of or relating to or characteristic of marble