Sucker Bet

While reading an article about sports, I clicked a supporting link and found myself here, at the NBA futures page at a gambling Web site. I’m curious about numbers and things, so I looked at the odds for a bit.

At this moment, there is an anomaly. “Anomaly” in my newly-minted dictionary of gambling terms is a time when a safer bet pays better than a riskier one.

In the NBA more than any other sport, random luck plays a smaller role in the outcome of games, and of seasons. There are no Cinderellas in the NBA. So when the Golden State Warriors managed to abuse the byzantine salary cap rules to land yet another all-star in Boogie Cousins for a season while the closest competitors went downhill, the gambling world said, “Fuck it, the Warriors are going to win the championship again.”

To bet on the Warriors winning the title next year, Las Vegas is giving you 10/17 odds. That is, the payoff is based on a 0.588 probability that they will win. Well over a coin flip.

But then I noticed this: on that same page the odds Golden State has of winning the Western Conference are 4/9, or 0.444 percent. Hence, a better payoff. Here’s the thing: The Warriors will not win the championship without first winning the division final. Yet somehow the bookies are paying less for the championship?

Yep. If you want action on the Warriors, don’t be a chump. Don’t follow the blind money to “Warriors win it all!”; follow the slightly-better-informed money to “Warriors make me money!”

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Time Not Well-Spent

Here it is, Whiskey-Exemption Thursday, and my weight is on-target so I can even have beer. The purpose of Thursday is to devote an evening to pushing the writing forward, and hang the consequences.

What have I been writing this fine evening? I’ve been trying to come up with the least-objectionable way to emulate Swift’s extensions to Protocols in php. The answer: there is no way.

Begin geek

Coding with php is coding with flint knives and bearskins; the power of php is in its wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am ability to do a quick task and then to go away.

Bless the movers behind php, they’re trying to evolve their language to catch up with the way people are using it these days. If they had known Drupal was coming along, they might not have been so quick-and-dirty before. Drupal might be slightly less awful as a result.

There are design patterns enabled by Swift that I get a little misty contemplating. Being able to add extensions (with executable code!) to protocols is enormously powerful. Having experienced that, I wanted to do the same thing in php, creating a trait “taggable” and having classes that used it automatically injected with the implementation. Injected, not inherited. Ain’t gonna happen.

End geek

At least now I’m writing prose about writing the code rather than writing the code itself. Progress, I guess.

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The Thursday Whiskey Exemption

In my days, I’ve only had success with one diet plan: set a target weight each week, lower than the week before. If, when I weigh myself in the morning, I am above the target weight, then I may not consume alcohol that day. Pretty simple, and embarrassingly motivating for me.

I lost more than 30 pounds on this plan, then events intervened, weakness ensued, work pressure ratcheted up, and I have now gained most of the weight back. In January I resolved to get back on the plan, but here’s the thing: While I don’t think my writing is any better after a couple of beers, it’s certainly more prolific. So now I do a dance between health and writing, and lately writing has been winning. But now blood pressure is a factor.

So I have launched my pound-a-week program again, with one modifier. On Thursdays, even if I’m over my weight target, I may have whiskey. I used to call Thursday “Beer-blogging day” — it was an evening where I set aside time to ramble for a bit, and to work on other, more serious projects. Whiskey is a little bit less fattening than beer, so I’ve decided this time around to try to relieve the tension between obesity and creativity by allowing a Thursday whiskey exemption.

For the record, on this particular Thursday I was below the weight threshold for the week anyway. The first few weeks of a new diet are actually pretty easy.

Happy Thursday, everyone!

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