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TʜᴇʀᴀᴘʏGⒶʀʏ⁽ᵗʰᵉʸ‘ᵗʰᵉᵐ⁾

@ TherapyGary @lemmy.blahaj.zone

Posts
9
Comments
238
Joined
2 yr. ago

Being a bodyless head with a freak long tongue is not only okay—it can be an exciting opportunity

  • My favorite is "Thanks, you too 😊" and just keep walking

  • Removed

    Funny meme

    Jump
  • Lmao so true

  • no u

  • There's not. You sound exactly like people who try to justify throwing garbage in a recycling bin

  • Knowing which bin isn't the same as being familiar with that bin's rules. Most are going to assume if they see it they can dispose of waste in some sort of "normal" fashion. Banning an entire subsection that can still fit in the bin by rule only is asking to have a difficult to enforce rule. Complaining that a difficult to enforce rule is difficult is ... a major lack of self-awareness.

    ~A person who throws food waste in the recycle

  • I literally cannot comprehend why you wouldn't look at the community name before commenting. Do you not read titles either? What kind of life are you people living- it genuinely baffles me

  • Why aren't people checking what community they're about to participate in? That feels like it ought to be standard behaviour

  • 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.

  • Libs suck at trolling ime

  • What's slop

  • Ye ☺ it's so broken but I love the UI too much to switch lol

  • How is it not?

  • Does "unbiased" mean supporting a neoliberal status quo?

  • My mom used juicy couture shampoo to bathe her yorkie (that makes her sound posh as hell but I swear she's not), so I assumed the brand was made for dogs and thought it was really weird when human women said they used it lol

  • pussy

  • Sounds like propaganda tbh

  • I prefer imgur tbh

  • Haha, classic