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Base eight is just like base ten really, if you're missing two fingers.

Tom Lehrer

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Tom Lehrer
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 9
Lyricist
Mathematician
Pianist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
University Teacher
New York City
New York
Thomas Andrew Lehrer
Thomas Lehrer
Fingers
Eight
Computer
Missing
Two
Really
Like
Base
Ten

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And although I'm all for freedom of expression and against censorship, there are certain things I'm not willing to go to jail for.
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If the hoods don't get you, the monoxide will.
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I'm not tempted to write a song about George W.Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them. And that's not funny.
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I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record.
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Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down ? That's not my department.
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Be it ever so decadent, there's no place like home.
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On my income tax 1040 it says 'Check this box if you are blind.' I wanted to put a check mark about three inches away.
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We are the folk song army, every one of us cares. We all hate poverty, war, and injustice unlike the rest of you squares.
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Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way.
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Laughter is involuntary. If it's funny you laugh.
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It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.
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The audience usually has to be with you, I'm afraid. I always regarded myself as not even preaching to the converted, I was titillating the converted.
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I wasn't really a performer by temperament.
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You can make fun with Saddam Hussein jokes ... but you can't make fun of, say, the concentration camps. I think my target was not so much evil, but benign stupidity people doing stupid things without realising or, instead, thinking they were doing good.
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In one word he told me the secret of success in mathematics: plagiarize only be sure always to call it . . . research.
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Well, you ask a silly question, and you get a silly answer.
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From the three, you then use one to make eight ones. You add those ones to the three, and you get one-three base eight, or, in other words, In base ten you have eleven, and you take away seven. And seven from eleven is four. Now go back to the sixty-fours, you're left with two.
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Step up and shake the hand Of someone you can't stand, You can tolerate him if you try!
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