KalliJ
41331
1342
13
Here’s the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU_j5cQ2sfQ
Here’s the paper:
https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/14/2002762807/-1/-1/0/GAMBLERS-RUIN.PDF/GAMBLERS-RUIN.PDF
Also, Tom Lehrer is credited with inventing the modern Jell-O shot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jello_shot#History
Here’s that song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV11OefIOgM
https://bsky.app/profile/opalescentopal.bsky.social/post/3luxxx27nos23
Fookin’ legend.
TODAYSNUMBERIS
Hilarious…?
certainlynotaserialkiller
i'm going to get shitfaced tonight on jello shots tonight in his honor.
bielgomesf
Tom Lehrer's wit lives on, even in death. His music was the perfect antidote to bureaucratic boredom and government drudgery. Now, the NSA will have to find a new way to make humorless decisions.
GorillaPowers
I ain't reading all that. Congrats or too bad or whatever
wherewehavebeen
https://media2.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPWE1NzM3M2U1ajZudWQxajkyaWZ1cmtnMzE0ZWV5cTJhYWd3cGx0czBxcWJreTI1biZlcD12MV9naWZzX3NlYXJjaCZjdD1n/Nrnv1lgo91AKDdq6yC/200w.webp
Me trying to understand this
bripi
Lemme explain...no, there is too much. Lemme sum-up: Lehrer wrote a song "Lobachevsky" which extols the virtues of plagiarism. In the paper OP is referring to, there is a bibliography reference to one Lobachevsky but there are *no calls* to that reference. That sort of thing should not be overlooked at the NSA, but no one discovered it until Opal did. (It's not the greatest of jokes, nor the most hilarious, it's just funny in a nerdy way)
NunyaBNess1
I hope he had the juiciest, spiciest, raciest, obituary since Alma's.
rumandbass
If you have to explain a joke.... Etc
PagetheFound
We at the NSA don't have a sense of humor that we are aware off.
lightfoot2
Thank you! I love game theory papers, and reading one from him will be fun this morning....
grundig79
And indeed we are richer for it.
Cranbananarama
Reaper's doing a speedrun or something. How many have we lost in the last couple months?
rumandbass
The boomers are gonna start dropping quickly over the next 5-10 years. We're gonna get obituary fatigue. (New band name?)
Wishbone1977
Oh, that is fantastic! I never heard about that, nor the fact that he is credited with the invention of the jello shot.
jfitz
“In 2012, rapper 2 Chainz sampled Lehrer's song "The Old Dope Peddler", on his 2012 debut album, Based on a T.R.U. Story. In 2013, Lehrer said he was "very proud" to have his song sampled "literally sixty years after I recorded it". Lehrer went on to describe his official response to the request to use his song: "As sole copyright owner of 'The Old Dope Peddler', I grant you motherfuckers permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?" - Wikipedia
daliamonra
Dude was a fucking genius!
ShwaTea
The world needs more Tom Lehrer at the moment not less. A sad day indeed
jupiterspinning
This is really sad news! I credit Tom Lehrer w/ helping me diffuse a rediculous situation at work years ago where I was told by admin in an observation that I should be teaching “skip counting” math in music class (I’m a music teacher). I didn’t react in the moment, but I was furious. Skip counting has nothing to do w/ music. I went home & learned this song, & had it ready to go next time that admin entered my room. It made them feel real silly.
https://youtu.be/EGB9CnF4qwQ?si=WLs2ALB42aiIm99G
zeacorzeppelin10
So he referenced his own song about plagiarism in an NSA paper while working for the NSA?
Lyconous
He took on the study habits of another great composer, PDQ Bach
theresamooselooseabootthishoose
Plagiarise! Let no ones work evade your eyes! But please be sure to call it research.
zeacorzeppelin10
Talk about holding out for a very long time.
zerogiven
I have a friend in Minsk, who has a friend in Pinsk
Whose friend in Omsk has friend in Tomsk with friend in Akmolinsk.
His friend in Alexandrovsk has friend in Petropavlovsk
Whose friend somehow is solving now the problem in Dnepropetrovsk!
dinomanm3
I still play New Math for my class every time I teach a segment on non-base-10 arithmetic.
Plasmodesmata
What a legend. I'm sure I first heard Lehrer on Dr. Demento in the 80's, and it turned out that my partner was a fan and exposed me to more of his music. I think being a biology professor added to my appreciation of him, and I still play "The Element Song" at the beginning of the chemistry section of my classes. What a life he had!
FrolickingFrolicking
That was an absurdly amount of words and fluff for what is a tiny unfunny meaningless non-joke of a bibliography referenced attributed to a fictional (believable) name.
A prank? How is that a prank.
The post is an insult to Lehrer’s humor which is much better than the shaggy dog story fluff post seemingly by a “content stretch” expert.
LeahTheUnknown
Have you considered moving on, or is this your hill?
PowerPedant
The name is not fictional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Lobachevsky
dingofdong
good grief, who pissed in your weetabix? It's a harmless little story about how a guy snuck a silly fictional reference in to a document for the NSA, an organisation which takes itself waaaay too seriously; it's a mild prank to be sure, but it's absolutely a prank on the institution and how seriously it takes itself.
UmamiMama
Am i too stupid to get this?
Dragonteuthis
Me too.
CorgiInALilBlackDress
What a guy 🥰
sowhat4
When I was in grad school in the '60s, Lehrer was 'the thing'. We'd listen to his songs on vinyl. The racier ones like "I got it from Agnes" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WHSVOVLmNY&ab_channel=MusicalComedy did not make it past the censors of the day. He was gay, BTW, but that, too, was not advertised in the 60s.
TheMeatIncident
Shit Lehrer died? We lost a real treasure.
daychilde
Excuse me, he was Tom Lehrer, not Shit Lehrer. How rude! ;-)
marthafarquar
He was 97. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics and got his MA a year later. He taught mathematics until the age of 73 and spent 3 years working for the NSA after being drafted, he told people he worked on nuclear weapons because his actal job was too secret to mention. His success here in the UK was due to his name being mentioned as a favourite of Princess Margaret and the BBC banning 10 of the 12 songs on his album which then sold 370,000 copies.
Willk95
Didn’t realize he lived in Cambridge, MA. Just a few miles down the road from me! 97 is a good long life lived
zerogiven
I get to call him a local too; he taught for many years at UC Santa Cruz, right up the (steeper each year) hill from where I live. He hated it when the students would want him to sing for them in his math lectures, though.
"No one ever asks me to solve equations at a music gig!"
NorthsideNation
Discovered him while searching through bargain bin albums at the record store! Absolutely brilliant music most of which still resonates today!
cepacolusmaximus
him and Ozzy gonna team up with some new material for the Vikings to sing in Valhalla
BrightEagle
Now I don’t think I trust that Wiki footnote, either.
abrubtopinion
I'm puzzled how none of you nerds have typed the full elements song lyrics into the comments from memory.
mafiacarstarter
Good enough?
amoth
tl;dr people don't read what you write
afatality
funny af right here
dingofdong
tbf, when I'm reading academic papers for research I'll only typically go and chase up the sources which are cited to back up specific claims/work which are relevant to the points I'm reading the paper for (i.e. the points relevant to my own research which I want to investigate deeper or understand/cite myself). I could definitely believe that even if people were reading the paper somewhat regularly in an academic way, and source 3 wasn't explicitly cited in the text, it could go unnoticed
BrockEffingSamson
.
FrolickingFrolicking
People may have read it, but they simply didn’t notice or care or research a believable fictional name among several other names in the bibliography. It’s not funny. It’s not conspicuous. Nobody would notice.
The post is like a YouTube video or SEO farm website that keeps talking about some supposedly funny hilarious “joke” but fails to ever get to the point, and you think you must have missed something. “Content” fluff.
fubizdaddie
You don't have to get a joke for others to enjoy it. The world won't cater to your understanding. It's over your head. Sit down and nobody will notice the fact that you missed something.
Badprenup
"I don't understand what the joke is but I can't just accept that and move on, better post a shitty comment about it instead."
HoneNathan
I understood some of those words.
Chionati
Lehrer is the German word for teacher. Now you understand another word ❤️
johnxbear
Me after getting to the "boze moihe" part. Or however that was spelled. https://media2.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPWE1NzM3M2U1aW4wMnI1dmM2Zm1yNW44dG9ya2E2amZwaHc1NW9qd2owOGtob3kzZCZlcD12MV9naWZzX3NlYXJjaCZjdD1n/nHoIlj7KrC8og/200w.webp
mafiacarstarter
In English, you can't technically spell that wrong, as you can't technically spell it right. It's Russian, and uses letters we don't have.
FiveHeadedSnakeGod
If you're already familiar with Tom Lehrer I don't know what to tell you, but if you're not, step one is to go give him a listen. Most if not all of his songs are probably on YouTube.
SmoeAhsolse
You can listen to the Lobachevsky song on Wikipedia:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobachevsky_(song)
HoneNathan
Ill add it to the list I guess.
SmoeAhsolse
They're also all on archive.org:
https://archive.org/detail">.org">archive.org:
https://archive.org/details/tom-lehrer-songs-archive
yoyopopo
I just gave it a shot and ended up on this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHPmRJIoc2k This guy does have some kind of charm to him. I'll try re-reading this post another time and see if I get the joke.
Dragonteuthis
If you figure out the joke, can you let me know too? I love Tom Lehrer, always have but I am stupid and feeble-minded and have absolutely no idea what the joke is.
FiveHeadedSnakeGod
I am here to assist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQHaGhC7C2E
SirSmurfalot
Ok, but my friend does not get what the joke was... just a fake article in the bibliography?
zerogiven
The song was from the point of view of a mathematician who, like his mentor he sang about, would lie, cheat, and plagiarize to get his papers recognized. So Tom helped out by citing their fictional work in a real-life paper.
FrolickingFrolicking
There is no joke. OP wrote a lot of words about some hilarious long-time delayed “joke”, but it’s nonsense fluff post. Lehrer is cool but all the post is about is that he put a fake reference in a paper using a fictional name from one of his songs
It’s like an Uncharted (videogame) developer writes an academic paper, and among many references in bibliography to papers and books he puts a fake one that is attributed to “Drake, N.”
Is that funny? No. Would anyone notice? No. Worth a post? No
IRCBrink
Makes sense, thanks
bambulina
It's not rolling on the floor funny, but it's cute & worth knowing. Your last few lines are unnecessarily harsh. His fans appreciate the detail.
IrrelevantIrrelevant
Some people are just wet blankets about anything that isn't a full on comedy routine.
It was an official paper, of course it wasn't going to be anything that compromised the actual information, just a cute little citation to see if anyone was paying attention.
daychilde
Kiddo, you need to go back to Jackass or whatever low-class low-effort shit you like and leave the adults alone.
LtRooney
Who pissed in your Cheerios?
manyslayer
Obviously Nikolai Lobachevsky.
zerogiven
But he calls it "research".
IGotTheMusicInMe425
What purpose did it serve to shit on everyone's good time here? Seriously, I'm asking, what was your aim exactly? To prove your big, self-important, show-offy smarts to everyone? Did you think anyone was going to think more highly of you after that? Do you believe that crapping on folks' good mood makes you a better person?
Lucallia
For someone with frolicking twice in their name they sure do lack the whimsy of the namesake. I would imagine it's hard to frolick is a stick so far up the ass.
PowerPedant
Definitely not a fictional name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Lobachevsky
Wishbone1977
No, Nikolai Lobachevsky was a real mathematician, but the version of him that Lehrer portrayed in his song was entirely fictional as far as I know.
PowerPedant
He is only mentioned by the title of a paper – which is indeed fictional. If that makes the person fictional in your eyes, then ok.
Wishbone1977
No... You haven't actually heard Lehrer's song "Lobachevsky", have you?