DocBug https://www.docbug.com/blog Intelligence, media technologies, intellectual property, and the occasional politics Fri, 22 Aug 2025 21:01:50 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.2 Tom Lehrer Easter Egg in NSA Publication https://www.docbug.com/blog/archives/1350 Fri, 22 Aug 2025 21:01:50 +0000 https://www.docbug.com/blog/?p=1350 Tom Lehrer worked at the NSA from 1955 through 1957, and a recent thread on BlueSky reveals one of the papers he wrote while there included a bibliographical entry for “Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Remannian Manifolds” by Lobachevsky. Apparently the joke went unnoticed for almost 60 years.

[via r/TomLehrer]

]]> History of the Sligh / Geeba deck in MTG https://www.docbug.com/blog/archives/1346 Sat, 02 Aug 2025 00:19:53 +0000 https://www.docbug.com/blog/?p=1346 I started playing Magic The Gathering when I was at Stanford back in early 1994, and introduced it to my high school friends when I went back to Atlanta that summer. One of those friends was Jay Schneider, who has this amazing habit of taking up a hobby and turning it into something world-class, so it didn’t really surprise me when a couple of years later I heard Jay had developed a new kind of deck that was turning the competitive MTG world on its head: a deck that looked for all the world like a bunch of random red crap commons, but just… kept… beating you. Jay called the deck Geeba, but everyone else called it the Sligh Deck after Paul Sligh, another friend who played Geeba in the tournament where it first came to prominence.

Anyway, The Tranquil Domain has just put out a 15 minute interview with Jay and Paul about the history of the Geeba / Sligh deck. Enjoy!

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