Although parenthood pushed him into blogging hiatus eighteen months ago, David Morgan has had time to attempt become a millionaire. He faced the $500 000 question last night, on the length of Mercury’s rotation, picked the right answer (88 days), but wisely decided not to risk the $250 000 he already had.
Congratulations on his success!
In another manifestation of the mysterious BlogGeist, my thought processes watching the show were almost exactly parallel to David’s. I had the same guess, and a similar calculation that the expected utility[1] of backing my judgement would be less than that of the certain quarter-mill.
fn1. Rank-dependent, for those who care about exactitude in these things.
John Quiggin 
It’s hard to be impressed without knowing what the other choices were. Was it more like: a. 0.03, b. 2, c. 88, d. 7,367; or a. 55, b.88, c.98, d.156?
58,68 and 78
Not to quibble, but shouldn’t it be a “demi-semi millionaire”?
Quibbling is good for the soul. Why not hemi semi millionaire?
If ever I needed proof that this community does not in some crucial ways resemble the normal population, this is it.. I would have been stuck between fear and desire. Ultimately my vision of failure would be more painful than the pleasure of success, and I would quit. Given that the failure bit increases, and the additional success bit goes down each round.
Oh, and if you want some more fun with risk analysis, try this on the rejuvenation of a two hundred year old “proof” of the existence of God to demonstrate she has a 67% chance of existing. (via Calpundit with its usual horde of comments on the matter).
Was that him on last night? Crap. If I’d known I might actually have watched. (I got the right answer, of course.)
If he’d guessed, he would have had a 3/4 probability of winning $32,000 and a 1/4 probability of winning $500,000, which is an expected win of $149,000.
Or he could have taken the $250000 in the hand, which he did. He’d have been crazy to do anything else.