Joe:

``ergodic,  Dirichlet  prior  and   distribution,   Tchebycheff's
inequality, Kullback-Leibler distance, etc.''

Ha! I felt the same way. (Except  for  Tchebycheff's  inequality,
which  I  pattern matched to the Chebyshev's inequality I studied
in my undergraduate probability course.)

Obviously  I  didn't  get  around  to  thoroughly   understanding
Dirichlet  priors and distributions---Charles had to cover for me
there---but I did spend a lot of time reading about Markov Chains
and  ergodicity. If you're interested, here is the best treatment
I've found on the web as yet:

http://random.mat.sbg.ac.at/~ste/diss/node6.html

I can't resist adding on a cynical  note  that  perhaps  all  the
highfalutin terminology helped get the paper published. Price and
Boutilier's 1998 paper was based on the same ground ideas but was
much easier to understand; it didn't get accepted to ICML. :)