TherapyGary

My apologies, I've revised my comment

First they came for the gooners,
and Dremor removed my post,
because they're insecure about being a gooner

Then they came for the queers,
and I died in prison,
because of Dremor being a twat

Then they came for Dremor,
and thank goodness,
because they suck

This is technically a repost now because a clueless mod removed it

My last post about this has identical text now because I edited it to reflect the updates in this post, but that doesn't make this a repost

The meme attached is brand new- I made it last night

Yeah but this is a brand new meme I made about it last night, and these are one-click phone numbers that get you straight to a person automatically, which I put together this morning.

I know it can be annoying, but we gotta keep the pressure on for a few days at least if we wanna see change

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

I worked as a mathematician at the NSA during the second Obama administration and the first half of the first Trump administration. I had long enjoyed Tom Lehrer's music, and I knew he had worked for the NSA during the Korean War era.

The NSA's research directorate has an electronic library, so I eventually figured, what the heck, let's see if we can find anything he published internally! And I found a few articles I can't comment on. But there was one unclassified article-- "Gambler's Ruin With Soft-Hearted Adversary".

The paper was co-written by Lehrer and R. E. Fagen, published in January, 1957. The mathematical content is pretty interesting, but that's not what stuck out to me when I read it. See, the paper cites FIVE sources throughout its body. But the bibliography lists SIX sources. What's the leftover?

Well, you can look through the entirety of the body of the paper. It'll take you a while, but you can pretty quickly pick up that sources 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 are all cited. But if you know anything about Lehrer's musical career, you can probably figure it out by looking at the bibliography.

See, entry 3 in the bibliography is "Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifolds" by one N. Lobachevsky. And if you've ever heard Leher's song "Lobachevsky", you may have just finished that title with "Bozhe moi!"

Now, it's important to note: this paper was published internally in 1957. Tom Lehrer had recorded and released "Songs by Tom Lehrer" in 1953, with "Lobachevsky" included. The song had already achieved some success. ...but nobody at the NSA noticed when he and Fagan dropped it in as a reference.

It struck me as a very Lehrer-ish sort of prank. It's harmless, it's light-hearted, and it thumbs its nose a bit at stuffy respectability through its unfailing pretense of seriousness. How had other people reacted to the joke, I wondered?

So I sent an email to the NSA historians. And I asked them: hey, when was this first noticed, and how much of a gas did people think it was? Did he get in trouble for it? That sort of stuff. The answer came back: "We've never heard of this before. It's news to us."

In November of 2016, nearly 60 years after the paper was published internally, I had discovered the joke. A few years later, I filed to have the paper declassified, and the NSA eventually agreed, and even put it up on their webpage: https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/14/2002762807/-1/-1/0/GAMBLERS-RUIN.PDF/GAMBLERS-RUIN.PDF

Once that had happened, I wrote to Mr. Lehrer with a copy of the paper and a letter asking if he had ever gotten in trouble for it. He kindly wrote back, including a copy of the paper that had been published in Journal of SIAM in 1958, under a slightly different title. Nobody, he said, caught him.

The copy that was published as "Random Walks with Restraining Barrier as Applied to the Biased Binary Counter", of course, didn't include the Lobachevsky reference.

Tom Lehrer wasn't just a satirist or a musician. He as a comedian who could quietly tell a joke and wait more than SIXTY YEARS for the payoff. That's dedication to craft. We lost an icon.

Haha cool

Maybe so! Mentioning that human rights are at stake can be more impactful, but also risks turning off potential supporters, so idk

This all started with a phone call campaign. It can be reversed with one

Thanks for sharing! I'll convert this to plain text with clickable single-dial phone numbers and emails and repost tomorrow morning

One-tap dial phone numbers:

Master card

• US + Can English
  (skips card number input)

• Global

Visa

• US English

PayPal

• US English
  Say "make a complaint"

• Global

Stripe (unconfirmed)

• US English

Script:

I’m calling to urge [company name] to immediately end the policy that unfairly targets the adult content industry. I’m also asking that [company name] sit down with stakeholders- specifically sex workers and adult content creators- to develop solutions that ensure equitable access to financial services, create stability, and reduce harm for sex workers.

One-tap dial phone numbers:

Master card

• US + Can English
  (skips card number input)

• Global

Visa

• US English

PayPal

• US English
  Say "make a complaint"

• Global

Stripe (unconfirmed)

• US English

Script:

I’m calling to urge [company name] to immediately end the policy that unfairly targets the adult content industry. I’m also asking that [company name] sit down with stakeholders- specifically sex workers and adult content creators- to develop solutions that ensure equitable access to financial services, create stability, and reduce harm for sex workers.