- When you turn a bottle over to pour out its contents it is less messy if you do the tilt thing to make sure there is a space for air to flow back into the bottle. But which way of pouring is faster if you just want to dump it out in the shortest time possible? I think the tilt can never be as fast.
- I aspire to hit for the cycle: publish in all the top 5 economics journals. But it would be a lifetime cycle. Has anyone ever hit for the cycle in a single year?
- If you know you’ll get over it eventually shouldn’t you be over it now? And if not should you really get over it later?
- The efficient markets hypothesis means that there is no trading strategy that consistently loses money. (Because if there were then the negative of that strategy would consistently make a profit.) So trade with abandon!
- I predict that in the future the distinct meanings of the prepositions “in” and “on” will progressively blur because of mobile phone typos.
Drawing: Scatterbrained from www.f1me.net (yaaay she’s back.)
Cheap Talk 
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February 5, 2013 at 12:13 am
Gavin
Re #1 – I’ve always considered the fastest way to empty a bottle is to tip it over and swirl it, creating a vortex where the air can get in and the liquid out rapidly. Never tested it though.
Re #3 – People want (need?) to feel aggrieved in the short/immediate term but, given the benefit of distance, in this case time, can view the incident more rationally. This is not to say that no one would or should ever hold a grudge. Some things just can’t be forgiven. Or forgotten.
Re #5 – What about if and of?
February 5, 2013 at 1:15 am
jeff
i think what separates in/on versus if/of is that in/on are both prepositions and are sometimes interchangable anyway. the line between interchangable and not will gradually recede
February 5, 2013 at 12:30 am
apatir
Re #1, Gavin is right:
http://www.hko.gov.hk/education/edu06nature/ele_gurgling_e.htm
February 5, 2013 at 12:34 am
apatir
By the way, a famous question that physics graduate students are sometimes asked is why do water flow out of an upside-down bottle at all. Hint: gravity is not a sufficient answer, because the atmospheric pressure is more than enough to support the water in a bottle that’s shorter than 34 feet.
February 5, 2013 at 1:01 am
jeff
apatir thanks for the link but that can’t really settle it right? If I just barely tilt the bottle above horizontal the liquid will get trapped in the shoulder and never even leave the bottle. Doesn’t the flow rate increase as you increase the angle of the tilt? So then if tilting is better it means there is a downward discontinuity at the “gurgle” point.
February 5, 2013 at 1:25 am
apatir
My guess is that the optimal angle would be at some positive value (w.r.t. the horizon). The pouring time would increase for lower angles, to +infty for a low enough angle. Also, the pouring time probably increases when you move from 90 to lower angles. So overall, it decreases from zero to the minimum and then increases and then decreases again. Now, whether or not the increase after the minimum is continuous or a jump is not clear to me. However, it wouldn’t surprise me if it is discontinuous, because the “gurgle” is turbulent flow, which often leads to discontinuities (think of the wake behind a ship, and how the turbulence is limited to a well defined area).
Preforming the calculation with a realistically shaped bottle would be impossible. Even simulating it numerically would be tricky, but surely one can experiment.
February 5, 2013 at 1:29 am
jeff
experiment exshpmeariment, this is theory. The thing is when you have reached the gurgling stage the flow rate fluctuates depending on whether a bubble is going up or has just made it to the top. I claim that the flow rate reaches its upper bound at the moment the bubble has just made it through. If so then if tilt outperforms gurgle it must be because the constant flow rate from optimal tilting is better than the average (over time) flow rate from gurgling.
February 5, 2013 at 6:53 am
Bryce
I’ve experimented with this while rinsing out bottles for recycling, and my conclusion is that it depends strongly on the ratio of bottle volume to bottleneck width. With beer/soda bottles, the speed is about the same (to within the precision of my counting); with wine bottles, creating a vortex is observably faster.
February 5, 2013 at 2:19 am
Evan
I think John List got 4 in 2004 (he missed ReStud).
February 5, 2013 at 2:22 am
Bruno Salcedo
Acemoglu only missed QJE in 2008, but he doubled JPE
http://economics.mit.edu/faculty/acemoglu/cv
February 5, 2013 at 6:18 am
The efficient markets hypothesis means that there is no trading strategy that consistently loses money. « Nation of Beancounters
[…] – Jeff Ely […]
February 5, 2013 at 7:05 am
Noto
Re #2, Stiglitz 1969.
Click to access STIGLITZ%20CV%20April%2030%202010.pdf
I think most of the recent Clark medal winners haven’t hit for that lifetime cycle.
My “cycle” is one top 5, JASA, Nature (or Science), one top IEEE CS journal, and The New Yorker. As far as I know, nobody has ever done this.
February 5, 2013 at 7:20 am
Noto
Also, it should probably be a “slam” rather than cycle. Grand Slam (as in golf and tennis) is better analogy. And then Career Slam is what you are after. Then one could build off the Tiger Slam and ask whether anyone has published in each top 5 in a 12-month period, rather than restricting ourselves to calendar years.
February 5, 2013 at 8:49 am
jeff
I considered slam but went with cycle because only one player can wins grand slam in a given year. Hitting for the cycle is an individual achievement. Moreover you can hit for the cycle and go 4 for 5 in the game. To win the slam you must go 4 for 4.
February 5, 2013 at 10:05 am
Noto
Good points; cycle is better.
February 5, 2013 at 2:08 pm
alex
But in a cycle there is a clear hierarchy, whereas for the slam preferences may differ.
February 5, 2013 at 7:07 am
Steve Reilly
4) Transaction costs lose money consistently. There are no mirror-image transaction gains.
February 5, 2013 at 8:33 am
jamesoswald
3. The optimal amount of time to get over something is almost never 0. If some event causes you a strong amount of emotion, your brain should take some time to analyze it and figure out what went wrong. Taking time to grieve can be very beneficial, in the case of losing a loved one. You allow yourself to come to terms with what they meant to you.
If I know my computer can factor a large pseudo-prime eventually, does that imply that it can factor it instantly?
February 5, 2013 at 8:47 am
jeff
Nice.
February 5, 2013 at 12:52 pm
James
Re #4: Even disregarding transaction costs, I am not sure if this is true. Consider the strategy of trading on your random hunches. It may be impossible to reverse this strategy, because it is too difficult to understand your own mind to do exactly the opposite of your instincts in every situation (George in Seinfeld exhibited this problem). So it may be possible to lose money trading on your random hunches even though it is not possible to make money doing the opposite.
February 5, 2013 at 4:13 pm
Pseudonymous
True, but then it’d be possible for another person to make money by doing the opposite of your actions, right?
February 5, 2013 at 2:36 pm
Andy
#3 also suggests that all apologies are fundamentally insincere. If you were going to be truly sorry you wouldn’t have done it.
February 6, 2013 at 8:22 am
anon72
Re #2: John List in 2004 came close, missing only REStud.
February 6, 2013 at 8:32 am
Anonymous
AER, Econometrica, JPE, QJE…what’s the fifth? ReStat? ReStud? JET? Depends on your field, I think.
February 6, 2013 at 10:47 pm
Cooper
In Spanish and Portuguese in and on are already the same word (en and em) with no ill effects, so it could happen
February 9, 2013 at 10:33 am
jij
#4 Kind of. Take two example strategies:
A: Buy low, Sell high
B: Buy high, Sell low
If you always trade the current market value, then due to EMH, yes they will result in the same outcome due to the constraints on the market value.
However, there is an asymmetry here because it is always possible to buy high and sell low if you are willing to sell for much less then market value.
So the best losing strategy is to buy Amazon shares and then give them away for free.
March 15, 2013 at 5:17 am
fin
Even with efficient markets, diversifiable risk is not priced. An arbitrarily chosen strategy will be vulnerable to idiosyncratic risk, so “trading away” will make losses compared to holding a diversified portfolio.
October 14, 2013 at 7:10 am
A Brief Word on the 2013 Nobel | A Fine Theorem
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