Just broke the Water Pitcher

I just upgraded to MS-Office 2008 for mac. God help me. I did it without reading the reviews. Now I discover custom macros are history. I don’t really care so much, except I worry that EndNote won’t play nice now. (Won’t that be lovely?) And I used to have a custom macro for converting ascii/plaintext – i.e. stripping out all the hard returns. So I could cut&paste email or a Gutenberg book, select one menu item, and get the lines to wrap instead of being all sullen and jagged out there on the right. It’s such a common problem. Now how am I going to solve it?

What’s a simple fix for converting ascii/plaintext to MS-Word?

UPDATE: OK, on reflection it’s pretty clear how to make a 4-step fix using find&replace. Having bothered to figure this out, I’ll just put the simple solution under the fold. [click to continue…]

Forthcoming from James Fowler in PS: Political Science and Politics

Stephen Colbert, the host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, claims that politicians who appear on his show will become more popular and are more likely to win elections. Although online discussions cite anecdotal evidence in support of his claim, it has never been scrutinized scientifically. In this article I use “facts” (sorry, Stephen) provided by the Federal Election Commission to create a matched control group of candidates who have never appeared on The Colbert Report. I then compare the personal campaign donations they receive to those received by candidates who have appeared on the program’s segment “Better Know a District.” The results show that Democratic candidates who appear on the Report receive a statistically significant “Colbert bump” in campaign donations, raising 44% more money in a 30-day period after appearing on the show. However, there is no evidence of a similar boost for Republicans. These results constitute the first scientific evidence of Stephen Colbert’s influence on political campaigns.

I’ve been wondering when the ‘we are not torturers the media should stop spreading lies’ meme would smoothly transition to the ‘obviously we are torturers why is the media peddling old news?’ meme. It’s been a slow train a comin’, but here it is.

This picture is presently on the reddit front page under the byline, “The Coolest Guy Ever.” Some people in the comments thread are skeptical that such a person (and his parrot) could really exist, but I see him and the macaw pretty regularly as they drive around Tucson.

Henley:

So many publications have expressed such overwhelming interest in the perspectives of those of us who opposed the Iraq War when it had a chance of doing good that I have had to permit multiple publication of this article in most of the nation’s elite media venues – collecting, I am almost embarrassed to admit, a separate fee from each. Everyone recognizes that the opinions of those of us who were right about Iraq then are crucial to formulating sane, just policy now. It’s a lot of pressure, so please forgive anything glib or short you read herein: between articles, interviews, think-tank panels and presentations before government agencies and policy organs I’m not permitted to mention, I’m a little frazzled …

Sometimes I think the other question is almost more interesting: What the fuck were those other people thinking? Alas, answers to that one are hard to come by, since understandable shame has closed many mouths. So my own side of the story will have to suffice.

Tonight’s selection goes with last night’s. Late 1860’s US SF. Ergo, for fun, another Lulu edition.

"No," said Q. bravely, "at the least it must be very substantial. It must stand fire well, very well. Iron will not answer. It must be brick; we must have a Brick Moon."

Along with The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Three Little Pigs, Edward E. Hale’s "The Brick Moon" (1869) is one of the three great brickpunk classics of world literature.

Sandemanian technopreneurs look to the bold, bricks & mortar future, with a flywheel-launched, satellite-based global positioning system; but learn valuable life lessons instead.

Brick. It’s awesome stuff.

"The Brick Moon" was originally serialized in The Atlantic Monthly. And there is an interesting thematic connection with the Steam Man, above and beyond the nigh simultaneous publication. Apparently the inspiration for the Steam Man was – the BigDog of its day – this. "However, by observing carefully the cause of failure, persevering and perfecting the man-form, and by substituting steam in place of the perpetual motion machine, the present success was attained." Words to live by.

As I was saying, in "The Brick Moon", our protagonists are likewise weaned off unreal dreams. "Like all boys, we had tried our hands at perpetual motion. For me, I was sure I could square the circle, if they would give me chalk enough." Then, having put away childish things, they are soon enough hyrodynamically flywheeling tons of bricks into the lower atmosphere.

Here’s a free PDF.

Arguably, this version of the three little pigs is even better.

If you are more old school, here’s Gilgamesh: "Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk around, examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork thoroughly. Is not (even the core of) the brick structure made of kiln-fired brick, and did not the Seven Sages themselves lay out its plans?"

Brick. Awesome.

No. Nothing to do with Spitzer. I’ve been reading some of the works of 18th Century right-wing blogger German counter-Enlightenment intellectual Justus Möser. (Wikipedia.) [click to continue…]

Since I’ve already been giving grief to prominent economists today, I might as well annoy one of our regular commenters (whom I actually quite like) still further, by linking to this Harvard Crimson article on the political economy of the textbook market (many thanks to the correspondent who sent it to me).

Since N. Gregory Mankiw returned to Harvard to teach the College’s introductory economics class, 2,278 students have filled his weekly lectures, many picking up the former Bush advisor’s best-selling textbook, “Principle of Economics” along the way. So, what has professor of economics Mankiw done with those profits? “I don’t talk about personal finances,” Mankiw said, adding that he has never considered giving the proceeds to charity. … With textbook prices sky high, some professors feel an obligation to donate the proceeds they receive by assigning their own textbooks for their classes. Kenneth A. Shepsle, the professor of government who teaches Social Analysis 46: “Thinking About Politics,” allows students to e-mail suggestions for where the charity money should go. … Similarly, the professor who introduces thousands of Harvard undergraduates to what is just finds it unjust to profit from textbook sales.

… Like many introductory textbooks, Mankiw’s book has seen frequent republication. Retailing for $175 on Amazon.com, “Principles of Economics” has come out in four editions since its first publication in 1998. Economics chair James K. Stock is known for complaining in class about this practice, although not about “Principles of Economics” in particular. “New editions are to a considerable extent simply another tool used by publishers and textbook authors to maintain their revenue stream, that is, to keep up prices,” Stock wrote in an e-mailed statement. He said that while he requires his own book for his class, he encourages students to buy older editions and international copies, and said one student bought a Korean copy for 15 percent of the domestic list price. “Some new editions really do make substantial intellectual improvements, but I would suggest that is the exception not the rule,” Stock said. … Mankiw asserts that “Principles of Economics” has been the bible of Harvard economics concentrators since before he took over “Economics 10.” … “The textbook chose the professor, the professor didn’t choose the textbook,” Mankiw said.

If he’s being quoted accurately, Mankiw seems unduly defensive. If I were him, I’d take a much more pro-active stance. I’d claim that I was teaching my students a valuable practical lesson in economics, by illustrating how regulatory power (the power to assign mandatory textbooks for a required credit class, and to smother secondary markets by frequently printing and requiring new editions) can lead to rent-seeking and the creation of effective monopolies. Indeed, I would use graphs and basic math in both book and classroom to illustrate this, so that students would be left in no doubt whatsoever about what was happening. This would really bring the arguments of public choice home to them in a forceful and direct way, teaching them a lesson that they would remember for a very long time.

The alternative – that a benevolent and all-seeing regulator named Gregory Mankiw has chosen the very best textbook available for the students, and that any rents flowing from the $175 cover price were completely irrelevant to his decision making process – seems to be closer to Mankiw’s preferred explanation, and I see no reason whatsoever to doubt his sincerity (really – I’m not being sarcastic here, even if, like Stock, I generally consider the frequently updated textbook game to be a very fishy business). But it’s a claim that’s surely rather hard to reconcile with the usual political lessons we’re expected to draw from econ 10, econ 101 and their cousins.

In mathematics, the monster Lie algebra is an infinite dimensional generalized Kac-Moody algebra acted on by the monster group, that was used to prove the monstrous moonshine conjectures.
[click to continue…]

Just to be clear: I have the highest respect for Brian Leiter’s scholarship and have personally ordered a copy. That said – and while we are on the subject of strange covers showing up on Amazon – there is a problem. I can’t help but feel Routledge must be somehow responsible.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that we witness the first stage of the process here [Powell’s Books]:

At this point, someone leaned over someone’s shoulder: ‘Dude, it should have, like, an S in it.’

Thus, the happy final product displayed on the Amazon page

My colleage, Axel G., noticed it. (Don’t know whether he cares for getting credit, but now he has it.)

Belle, at her and John’s other place, describes the argument of a quite startlingly horrendous post at NRO’s The Corner.

The truly beautiful thing about this is that it incoherently wavers between two poles of repulsive slander: is it Communist Negroes having sex with our white women? Or are Communist Jewesses subverting black Americans who, patriotic though modestly ill-treated, would have been able to resist had the party not offered them the tempting fruits of miscegenation?

Unfortunately, I imagine that this is only the start …