Coyote Blog

This is awesome, and the only real argument is which one is the bigger piece of crap.  The drag race was particularly funny. Part 2 here

Update: Fixed the second link.  Forgot to give credit to reader Leith Kronenberg for the link, who, by the way, needs his own blog.

My wife watches Dancing with the Stars, and has a bunch of old episodes she was plowing through this weekend on TIVO.  Contestant Mark Cuban, Internet billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, seems to want to cultivate a geek image.  Each dancer is given a score of 1-10 from each of three judges.  Upon getting his score of 7+7+7=21, Cuban made a comment that one would classify as fairly unusual for such a show: "I was kind of hoping for a higher prime number."

I am sure most of the viewers ooohed and aaahhhed.  What an intellectual Mark Cuban is!  Except there is a problem.  21 is not a prime number.  Yes, it's sort of seductively odd, like 51 or 87, but like those numbers it is divisible by 3.  Which makes sense since his score was computed as 3x7.  OK, so maybe he was talking about the "7" he received from each judge.  Well, the number 7 is indeed prime.  But there are no other prime numbers less than or equal to 10.  It would be impossible to get a higher prime number score than 7 unless the judges went up to a Spinal-Tap-esque 11.

I really wasn't going to publish this little insight until I saw TJIC publish this.

Update:  Fixed link.  I guess it is a bad sign of my own geek-dom if I can't get an html link right.

Ted Roberts gets at a pet peeve of mine when he says:

Everything that's wrong with government can be summarized by a single
sign that stands eloquently at the entrance to my neighborhood park. A
plot of green with tennis courts and soccer fields for athletes and
playground paraphernalia for junior swingers. I mean the kind that
really like to swing. Cursed with a civic attitude that makes me wary
of gifts from politicians, I note A boastful sign. "This playground
made possible by the city of Huntsville and the Madison County
Commission," it says. Not a blatant lie - just a fuzzy deception. About
as far from the truth as the mayor's office downtown is from this
suburban playground.

I think it's the tone of our "governors" (using the word in a literal
sense) that bothers me. Their proclamations of achievement. They are
ignoring the contribution of me and my fellow taxpayers to this oasis.
They forget that we are a society of the taxpayers, by the taxpayers
and for the taxpayers.

I would go further.  I hate it when politicians are called "caring" or "compassionate" when the sole evidence for this is the fact that they take my money and give it to someone else or build something with it that they can put their name on.

Update: Fixed link