Kevin's Weblog

I just finished some changes to make and keep this blog XHTML compliant. Fixing up the original validation failures was pretty easy, but illuminated some shortcomings in the way I'm writing my entries. Most notably, using the blox plugin just causes trouble. Really, I wanted to just make my entries valid XHTML from the start, with the help of Emacs PSGML mode.

The only real hitch in doing this is dealing with the title line. Right now I'm handling this with a real simple plugin that I whipped up that lets me wrap the title in any dummy markup, which it then strips out. So, now my entries are valid XHTML fragments, which is something PSGML mode deals with just a little bit of configuration.

I'll probably spend a little time to clean up, comment, and generalize the plugin, then contribute it to the plugin registry. Version 2, if it ever happens, will try to actually validate each entry as they are generated.

The problem with economists is that they think that money is the only thing that matters

A talk on Weds. mentioned that the expected payout betting on a 200 to 1 longshot at the race track is miserably lower than betting on the favorite. A few people suggested that these people might be deriving some benefit from such a bet other than the incredibly rare payout, but the speaker completely pooh-poohed that idea.

He also talked a little about the fact that people are really bad at understanding how rare some event are, and that they would be better considering probabilities below a certain level as just zero. An example is the lottery. On the other hand, for most people, a lottery payout is an effectively infinite amount of money, so I'm not sure that would work.

Overall, though, it was a pretty interesting talk, and it introduced us to Tradesports where you can bet on all sorts of interesting things.