This image is closer to what I was trying to capture with the photograph in my previous entry.

Last night, I finished the clean-up of a LAΤΕΧ version of my paper on incomplete preferences. From remarks by a person more knowledgeable about ΤΕΧ than I, it seemed that my best option in dealing with the under-sized angle brackets was to just fall back to using only parentheses, square brackets, and braces for taller delimiters. And most width problems were resolved by expressing formulæ over more lines. Unfortunately, these changes leave the formulæ harder to read than in the original.

This after-noon, I completed the submission process to one of the two specialized journals recommended by the advising editor who rejected it at the previous journal to which I submitted it. The submission process for this latest journal required that I name the other journals to which I'd submitted the paper. As simultaneous submissions are disallowed, basically they were asking for a list of which journals has rejected the paper. I gave it. (I didn't tell them that the third had been suggested by the second, nor that theirs had been suggested by the fourth.)

Anyway, I'm back to waiting for a response.

Large parts of Sunday and of Monday were given-over to producing a LAΤΕΧ version of my paper on incomplete preferences. Some part of to-day will be spent trying to complete that conversion.

Each of the two journals suggested by the advising editor who last rejected my paper requires submissions to be either LAΤΕΧ or in the form of a Microsoft Word file with formulæ encoded for its equation editor.

The original is an ODT, whose equations are encoded for the OpenOffice formula editor. The OpenOffice software can export a Word .DOC, but the formula would be rendered as text (rather than for the equation editor), and pretty badly at that. I used Writer2LaTeX, a plug-in for OpenOffice, to create a first-pass version of LAΤΕΧ source for my paper. A great deal of formatting went by the way-side, but the formulæ themselves seem to have come through the process mostly intact. The worst glitch so far was that U+2280 (⊀) was translated to \nsucc (⊁). (I've contacted the developer.)

I've nested the formulæ within more appropriate mark-up, and wrestled the rest of the mark-up of the paper into pretty good shape. The most glaring problems that I have right now are with the formulæ; those angle-brackets that should be rendered quite large are not, and some of the formulæ are simply too wide. And I still need to walk through the paper to make sure that my copying-and-pasting didn't go south anywhere.

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This conversion of my paper represents the first time that I have worked much with LAΤΕΧ beyond creäting bald formulæ.

When I first started doing word-processing of more than plain-text files, LAΤΕΧ itself didn't yet exist, the ΤΕΧ system (on which LAΤΕΧ is founded) was still quite new, and I had personal connections to AT&T, such that I learned and used an older system, troff, which had been developed at AT&T (to justify the development of Unix). I had (and somewhere still have) a porting of troff to MS-DOS, could get pretty much any desired result with it (unlike most troff users, I knew its mark-up pretty thoroughly, and didn't rely on macros other than those that I'd written myself), and saw little reason to learn ΤΕΧ or LAΤΕΧ. When I did migrate from troff, it was to WYSIWYG programs.[1]

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[1] There was an attempt, called Scientific Word, at something like a WYSIWYG interface for LAΤΕΧ; but, at the time that I investigated Scientific Word, it was ghastly. Its installation routine took hours, and, if the system already had a lot of installed fonts, would fail at the very end, in a way that its own programmers could not diagnose. And, if successfully installed, Scientific Word wouldn't produce decent LAΤΕΧ source anyway.

My latest submission of my paper, to a yet more specialized journal, has met with a fate similar to that of my previous submissions:

The advisory editor suggests that the paper does not fit the general readership of [this journal] (see his short report below).

That advisory editor writes

I suggest to the author to submit his paper, which certainly deserves an outlet, to more specialistic journals

and then recommends two in particular. So I will review the guidelines for each, and try to decide to which of them I will make my next submission. I take some solace in the fact that, while my paper is indeed being rejected, editors are suggesting that it truly ought to be published in a respected academic journal.

I first encountered Darrel Dane, the Doll Man, in a copy of Feature Comics #114 (September 1947) given to me by a friend.[1]

You can encounter Doll Man — if you are ready for the thrills — at Golden Age Comics (search both for doll man and for Feature Comics), at Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine, and at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

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[1] WTF? In middle school, friends just gave golden-age comic books to me! Another friend gave a copy of Action Comics #125 (October 1948) to me.

After some vacillation over the question of to which of two journals next to submit my paper, I have submitted it to a game theory journal which has published at least one other article attempting to operationalize incomplete preferences. (I think that attempt rather less satisfactory than mine.)

I have, alternately, been considering submitting to an older journal, based in Europe, which focusses primarily on mathematical microëconomic theory, but I decided both that they would be more likely to reject the paper as too specialized, and that my paper would be less widely read if published there.

Good L_rd! In response to my submission, the editor of the third journal responded

While I find the paper interesting, I feel it is too specialized a topic for a general audience journal such as [ours].

The thing is that, unlike the previous two journals, which cover economics in general, this is a journal of microëconomics. Yet, like the editor of the previous journal, the editor still feels that the paper is too specialized for the audience. (Though, as noted, this third journal was recommended by that editor of the second.)

I need to figure-out just who won't think it too specialized.

I stopped actively collecting comic books in my very late teens. But I held onto my collection, and hope to keep it to the end of my life. And for many years it had a gap in it that greatly annoyed me; specifically, I needed Giant-Sized Conan #3, in mint condition, to plug a hole. Whenever I would go into comic book stores, and the couple of times that I went to San Diego Comic-Con, I would look for that specific issue, in that condition. A few weeks ago, I finally managed to obtain a copy.

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At the end of April of last year, I announced

I have secured at least one complete exemplar of every variety of [working Mannheim slide-rule tie-clips] that was made for resale.

but retracted that claim about a week later. I am going to be so bold as to make the claim again. Actually, I obtained an exemplar of the missing sort some time ago, but its indicator wasn't in the best condition. The exemplar that arrived to-day was as-new, in its original box (whose exterior is a bit abraded) and with its original instructions (as-new).

I'm not sure how to count the sorts of clips in this collection, as there are minor variations, but I'd say that I have thirteen or fourteen sorts.

I have submitted my paper to a third journal, that recommended by the editor who rejected it at the previous journal.

This third journal is one from an association which, like many, charges a lower submission fee to its members. Even with the annual dues and on the assumption that I only made one submission in a year, I would still save money, so I joined. However, after I registered and paid, I learned that it could take up to four weeks for my membership information to be recorded and provided to me. Hence, this delay between submissions. I'm not sure that the money saved was worth that delay.

Here's a lithographic ex libris book-plate that I got yester-day: The artist is Karel Šimůnek (1869 – 1942), and the plate is from 1925. The image is about 106mm (4.2in) × 100mm (3.9in).