Obit watch: October 18, 2010.

Benoit Mandelbrot. I vividly remember reading about the Mandelbrot set in Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American back in the day, and then having hours of fun generating Mandelbrot sets on my computer.

When I say “hours of fun”, I mean “hours of fun” as I was using a Radio Shack Color Computer with a blazing fast 6809E processor running at 0.89 MHz (or 1.78 MHz: does POKE 65495,0 mean anything to anyone?) It pretty much took an entire day of processing to generate sets.

Also among the dead: Simon “Manimal” MacCorkindale. When A.T. mentioned this on Saturday, it occurred to me that, with current CGI technology, the time is ripe for a “Manimal” revival on NBC. Lord knows, it couldn’t be any worse than their current programming.

Here’s your Barbara Billingsley obit.

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