Last night and this morning, I used Writer2LAΤΕΧ to export the notes for my principal paper-in-progress from ODT format to a LAΤΕΧ file, imported that into LyX, and then spent some time cleaning things. This was in an attempt, which looks fairly successful, to overcome the problem that I now have of OpenOffice under RHEL failing to render various mathematical characters.

The results for the formulæ are not really WYSIWYG (nor does LyX seek to offer exactly a WYSIWYG display of formulæ), but they are close enough that, as I look at them, I don't have to spend most of my time thinking about the mark-up rather than thinking about the theoretical constructs that they are supposed to represent. (In fact, I'm one of those folk who prefers to word-process with the non-printing characters represented, and I'm quite comfortable with most of the extra stuff here in the representation of formulæ.) The symbols that I want are being rendered nicely, with the notable (but not egregious) exception of which is presently displayed as \defeq. (It's defined in a LAΤΕΧ document preamble as \stackrel{\mathrm{def}}{=}.)

I still have to learn more of my way around LyX but, barring some unexpected remedial action on the part of OpenOffice programmers, I will probably migrate to LyX for the production of technical documents.

Although I'm something of a fan of E[lzie] C[risler] Segar, what I like most when it comes to Popeye are the animated cartoons made by the Fleischer Studios, before they relocated to Florida. (Some years ago, the Woman of Interest got me a copy of Popeye the Sailor: 1933 – 1938, which was exactly the perfect collection for me.)

Anyway, I thought that I'd present my single favorite bit from those cartoons: For a better sense of what is happening here, watch Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves (1937), or at least the minute and 48 seconds starting at 6:12.

Popeye and Olive and Wimpy are the restaurant of an oasis village, when there is a warning that Abu Hassan and his band of forty thieves are out on a raid. The villagers go into hiding (as does Olive). Indeed, the thieves approach this very village. Popeye hears a great commotion outside, leaps from his stool, and begins pumping his fists.

Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves is, over all, not actually my favorite Popeye cartoon — which, off the top of my head, might instead be Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936), though I'm not sure — but this one bit is perfect. Popeye isn't sure what he's about to confront, but he's prepared to fight it! Popeye is emotionally prepared to fight anything,[1] and he expects to do so with his fists!

Popeye is, in important respects, a simple man. He has many apparently unexamined certitudes, leaps to conclusions, and often does things that are very inappropriate. And he knows that he's simple; that's part of what he's saying with I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam! Popeye doesn't typically think his way out of a problem; it doesn't even seem to occur to him to try. If thinking were suggested to him, then he'd probably confess that he couldn't. He uses his fisks 'cause that's what he's gots. And, ultimately, they've always seemed to be enough.

But, in the moral sphere, he is consistently doing his very best. Not just what others might see as enough, but his best. I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam! isn't used to rationalize shirking. Popeye is prepared to fight whatever comes through that door because, if it's bad, somebody has to fight it; and, if Popeye doesn't fight it, well, then who will?

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BTW, on Thursday, I received copies of the first three volumes of the Fantagraphics Popeye reprints from Edward R. Hamilton, mentioned in a previous entry; they had no remainder marks. (And the transaction seems otherwise to have been perfectly satisfactory.)

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[1] Except in-so-far as he has no personally acceptable means by which to fight a woman.

One or more persons have wandered to this 'blog searching with

openoffice weak preference symbol

which touches on the font-fallback problem that I mentioned in my previous entry.

The symbols that one would typically encounter or want to use when talking about preference are

[Up-Date (2011:04/05): I have since uploaded a more complete table, including symbols, Unicode values, and LAΤΕΧ code, in the form of a PDF file.]

Now, it used to be that, when running OpenOffice under Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I had no problem using the symbols of my choice from amongst those on the table above. But when I up-dated to RHEL 6.0, the OpenOffice formula editor stopped properly rendering any of the above except ∼.[3]

For the formulæ that I'd previously entered, I'd specified a font either of Times New Roman or of Liberation Serif. The files for neither of these fonts actually contain the symbols above, but OpenOffice and RHEL are supposed to coöperate to effect font-fallback, and draw the characters from the files for some similar font or fonts. The software had been doing this, but with the up-date to RHEL 6.0 it is not.

This isn't a particulary great problem for new formula; I would just need to change the configuration of the formula editor to use some font that has the desired symbols; one could even play specifically with the formula editor's catalog, so that just those symbols would be rendered with that font, and some preferred font could be used for everything else.

But one of the serious, long-standing deficiencies of the OpenOffice formula editor is that there isn't a way to globally change the settings for all formulæ which have already been entered into a document. I have literally hundreds of preëxisting formulæ, for each of which the editor would have to be individually reconfigured, to fix things within OpenOffice. Right now, my best option seems to be to export the relevant documents to ΤΕΧ or to LAΤΕΧ, and to proceed with a plain-text editor!

Red Hat has responded to my bug-report as if it were a request for enhancement; since they hadn't planned any near-term enhancements in the versions that they distribute of OpenOffice or of fontconfig (with which OpenOffice would handle font-fallback), they refuse to address the bug. OpenOffice.org, meanwhile, is aware that OpenOffice doesn't handle font-fallback properly, and aware that it ought to be possible to reconfigure the formula editor globally within a document, but had invested its hopes in the editor's using a specific font, OpenSymbol, to provide mathematical characters. That font doesn't have any of the characters above, except perhaps ∼.

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[1] The relation of weak preference is one of being either more desirable or equally desirable, rather than one of necessarily being just a little more desirable. On the assumption that preferences are a complete ordering, weak preference is equivalent to being not less desirable.

[2] This relation is one of being either less desirable or equally desirable, rather than one of necessarily being just a little less desirable. On the assumption that preferences are a complete ordering, this relation is equivalent to being not more desirable.

[3] I'd not been getting that by entering ∼, but by using the editor mark-up sim.

At 08:48 on 8 September 2009, I had resubmitted my paper on indecision to a journal after replacing acknowledgements with place-holders. (The paper was originally submitted on 3 September, with the acknowledgements in-place and with a note from me that one of their editors was mentioned thereïn. The journal tossed it back to me to scrub the acknowledgments.)

To-day, then, at 08:48, we passed Day 500 since the (re)submission of the paper. Day 500, and the present status is Under review, which became its official status on 15 November of last year. (I earlier labored its previous status changes.) Doubtless that someone is thinking that they've only had the paper for 67 days, but the journal itself has had it for 500 days.

I am aware — Would that there were a G_d to help us all! — that 500 days is not a record for such delay. Still, economics journals which report their mean time-to-decision typically declare it to be something on the order of a month.

I've lost about 20 lb (which corresponds to about 9 kg) recently, moving to the center from the high end of the normal range for my height. (I'm about 5ft 10in, which is just less than 178 cm.)

I'd not been weighing myself, but my clothes were tighter than I wanted, and I was unhappy with my appearance. I guessed that I needed to lose about 10 lb. I got out a scale and weighed myself, it told me that I weighed about 168 lb (which corresponds to 76.2 kg). Based on a table that I consulted, I decided to get down to 156 lb, so I lost 12 lb.

But, looking at more tables, I was seeing that, pretty consistently, a weight of 151 lb would be dead-center in the normal range. I decided to retarget to that. That would be another 5 lb.

Then, because my old, mechanical bathroom scale was acting-up, I got a new, electronic scale. It consistently gave a reading of about 3 or 4 lb more than did the old scale. *sigh*.

Anyway, according to the new scale, I dipped below 151 lb to-day. (That weight corresponds to about 68½ kg.) My programme was basically just one of reducing my intake of food-stuffs. I hadn't been eating a lot, but apparently my metabolism is pretty slow.

After one votes in California, one is offered a sticker announcing that one has done so. In my area, the stickers are typically available in English, in Spanish, and in Vietnamese. I ask for one in Vietnamese.

There are people who want English to be constitutionally declared to be the language of America; they are stunningly wrong.

Of most immediate importance, they are wrong because, whenever anything is made a matter of law, it is made a matter of force; behind any law is ultimately a gun. There are times for laws because there are times for force; there are times for guns. But language choice is not such a time. I have only contempt for someone who claims that there is a symmetry between being forced to speak the language of a merchant because he will not transact in another language and that merchant being forced by the state to transact in some other language, or official proceedings being legally restricted to a language utterly alien to important parties. (And my contempt extends to those who would force the use of minority languages, as well or instead of majority languages.)

Perhaps of even greater long-run importance, if a language is made an official language, the state is thereby empowered to determine whether this-or-that communication conforms to that language, which is to say that control of a language is seized by the state when the language is made official. The state develops the power to decide its grammar and its vocabulary.

America was given a foundation, however imperfect, of classical liberalism. It represents a gross violation of that foundation to tell people in what language they must express themselves, and a gross violation of that foundation to offer-up control of one of our languages to the state.

One of our languages. English is one of our languages; there are others. Any language spoken by an American is an American language. (And any name held by an American is an American name.) And there are people who don't know English who are far better Americans than those who would give that language a legally privileged position.

A few weeks ago, I got a standard seasonal influenza shot. None-the-less, a bit over a week ago (more than two weeks after the vaccination) I became ill with what seems an awful lot like a flu. It can be hard to distinguish a bad cold from a flu, but a even a bad cold should be over in a week or less. It's also possible that I've been hit by more than one infection (one opportunistically following on another), but Ockham's razor argues for one cause. So I'd say that I contracted a flu that was not covered by the vaccine.

I've tried to get some work done; but, mostly, I've felt that the last week-and-something has been lost.

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During this episode, while dreaming in a feverish state, I invented a very fine pair of characters for Li'l Abner. (An immediate problem is that Li'l Abner ceased to be an on-going story in late 1977.)

One of these characters is Amicable Jones, who is known in Dogpatch as someone who has always been able to settle any dispute amicably. The other character is his father, who was unfortunately unnamed in my dream but whom I'll here call Irascible Jones. Irascible Jones has not been in Dogpatch for a great many years. He's instead been all over the world, creäting conflicts or involving himself in disputes that are never subsequently resolved.

Now it has been learned that Irascible Jones is returning to Dogpatch. Amicable Jones doesn't much want a reünion; not so much because he has some generalized fear of new conflict, but specifically because, to settle his own disputes amicably, he has often given the other party something that, in fact, properly belonged to Irascible Jones.

There is no real agreement on how many muscles it takes to frown, nor on how many it takes to smile. But it takes none to be stupidly slack-jawed.

I want to discourage my readers from doing business through AbeBooks.com, which operates as a listing service of books for sale from a multitude of merchants.

A friend recently ordered a book from one of these merchants through Abe. The merchant responded by declaring that the book had been sold to another buyer, but then relisting the copy with other services, at a higher price. In other words, he or she, upon receiving an order, decided not only not to honor the advertised price, but to lie about the situation.

My friend then contacted AbeBooks.com to complain, explaining exactly what the seller had done. Abe responded with irrelevant boiler-plate about items that were no longer available. (The seller, for his or her part, responded with the irrelevant claim that he or she did not make money by hoarding books.)

When my friend again contacted Abe, the response was to deny that the book had been relisted. They repeated this denial to me. As my friend had made it explicit that the relisting had been with an alternate service, and had offered evidence, Abe's response was at best with reckless disregard for the truth, if not simply a lie. In the wake of having it reïterated that the listing was with other service and that evidence can be provided, AbeBooks.com has retreated into silence.

As I told AbeBooks.com

If you do not ensure honorable practice, then you are at best redundant amongst listing services.

So far, for example, my experiences with Alibris have been fine, and there are other services as well. If one finds a book listed with AbeBooks.com, there's a good chance that the very same seller lists the very same item through some other service as well. (I recommend using AddAll at the outset of a book search.)

Up-Date (2010:07/29): Yester-day, Abe broke their silence to declare that there was nothing that they could do about such a relisting. In fact, what they could have done is to de·list the seller. Evidently AbeBooks is amongst those very many firms who treat it as an acceptable form of lying to misrepresent a choice as a necessity.

Abe did offer my friend a coupon for a 10% discount on a future order. My friend couldn't, with this coupon, secure a copy of the same book at the same net price as it had been listed — it's perhaps worth noting that the seller's price increase had been more than 99%. And Abe was simply tossing to my friend the same sort of promotional coupon that other buyers are given anyway.

Catching shill-bidders on eBay used to be one of my hobbies. I would regularly stumble-upon suspicious confluences, start examining auction and bidder histories, and from them often assemble proof that there had been shill-bidding, which proof I would then send to eBay and to the victims. I'm sure that I wasn't the only person engaging in this sort of detection.

But eBay began choking-off the data available to us. With decreasing information, it became ever harder to make the case. It became impossible even to see some of the confluences that would have triggered suspicion in the first place.

For an honest auction firm, there may be an optimal amount of shill-bidding to allow, simply because of enforcement costs. (A perfectly secure trading environment would be prohibitively expensive.) But for a dishonest firm the question is of balancing the gain that otherwise comes from allowing ending prices (and hence fees) to be thus increased, against the alienation of users who consequently reduce their spending. Access to information which both empowers volunteers to catch shill-bidders and alerts users more generally to the occurrence of shill-bidding is, as such, not in the perceived interest of a dishonest firm.

BTW, the changes that reduced our abilities to spot shill-bidders, and which made it more typically impossible for us to prove a case of shill-bidding (as well as other changes that enabled eBay to be more easily used by thieves) were primarily effected while Margaret Cushing (Meg) Whitman, now the Republican Party nominee for governor of California, was eBay's President and CEO.