Richard Pryor Gone

I always enjoyed Richard Pryor. He had a level of honesty and lack of bullshit that I loved. The stuff of his I remember the most from my childhood was him and Gene Wilder in a couple of movies. Those two were hilarious together! I didn't get to see much of his stand up stuff.

The Washington Post notes that he was the ". . .first person to receive the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize for American humor" in 1998.



This was kind of interesting from the Observer:

". . .combined the profanity of Lenny Bruce with the perfect timing of old Vaudeville."

The Observer | International | Richard Pryor, comic voice of black America, dies

BBC NEWS | Africa | South Africa to have gay weddings

BBC NEWS | Africa | South Africa to have gay weddings

Here's an interesting fact from today's article:

"South Africa's constitution - introduced in 1996 - was the first in the world specifically to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of sexual preference."

BBC NEWS | US, when lying, only tells the truth?

BBC NEWS | Middle East | US 'admits' Iraq propaganda drive. . .

So, when you lie, if the lie is based on facts, you're actually telling the truth? I LIKE that!

Maybe this logic will get me hired onto the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Cool Math - Math Forum - Ask Dr. Math

My sister recently wanted help figuring out the inside surface of a pool--in order to figure out how many square feet of concrete should be needed to cover the inside of a pool. It took me an embarassingly long time to remember that all I need to do is figure out the area of five surfaces--the bottom, the front-inside wall, the rear-inside wall, the left-inside wall and the right-inside wall. Adding up the areas for all of these sides would be pretty easy, but figuring out the area for any of these surfaces would be a little harder than length x width if the given surface is not a square or rectangle. This article simplified the whole triangle and parallelogram solution along with using visualization techniques for remembering the general rectangle and square areas:

Figuring Out Area without memorizing formulae - Math Forum - Ask Dr. Math

I still haven't figured out the pool thing because of the curved connections between the sides and the bottom and also because the bottom surface will have a curved slope.

Sigh. . .Geometry. Why didn't I do my high school homework!?

Former PBS chair [a republican plant] violated law - MSNBC.com

Is it just me, and Ralph Nader, or does it seem like the press uncovers stuff like this all the time and then nothing is done about it? You gotta love the weasels in congress on both sides of the aisle who won't take tangeable action on anything hardly!

Former PBS chair violated law

Mass release from Ethiopian jails

Mass release from Ethiopian jails

The Seattle Times: Business & technology: Dial-a-human shortcuts

The Seattle Times has published the results of a hacking/research project to find out how to get through to a live person in a bunch of customer service centers (I'm trying to get permission to publish the entire data set here for posterity):

The Seattle Times: Business & technology: Dial-a-human shortcuts