I have had a lot of success creating dead keys on my keyboard to save keystrokes later. It doesn’t involve writing any new commands in the preamble of each file, and it lets me compress all my most-used commands to two, or at most three keystrokes. I’ve wasted many a productive hour on my keyboard.

The ones whose papers I’ve had to deal with must be insufficiently academic. Sigh.

Flavin:

This way, it’s clear what the macros are for; anybody who wants to reuse them can rename them.

But on the other hand, I’m not the one with a blog, a job and not on drugs.

\newcommand{\moment}[1]{\ensuremath{\left\langle
#1 \right\rangle}}
\newcommand{\cumulant}[1]{\ensuremath{\left\langle
#1 \right\rangle_{c}}}

Shouldn’t you have shortened these to something like \mom and \cum to save those few extra keystrokes? (Yes, I know I said “mom” “cum” and “stroke” in the same sentence, but now I’ve made the joke so we can move on.)

Your complaints of Junior Lab is spot on: the hardcore soul-crushing parts would be totally awesome if that intensity implied that learning (or, more specifically, being taught) useful skillz. But no.

Also: I’m glad I’m not the only one who felt unprepared around that time; I have always assumed my total lack of ability to do problem sets etc. was due to my stupidity in swallowing the Kool-Aid and doing 8.022 and 8.03 in ESG …

LaTeX suits my thinking style: it lets me worry about content and structure first, and then worry about how that structure is translated into visuals later. Of course, anything which suits me well is going to be horrible for somebody else — different strokes, and all that. I’m lucky in that the way I’m wired is fairly compatible with the “industry standard.”

** and most of my best research is unpublished in any case, being commercially sensitive.