Seems to me that a letter to the editor of ...
... Omni magazine pointed this out in roughly 1982 ... although it might have been in Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games in Scientific American in the same time frame. (I don't think it would have been as late as Hofstadter's newfangled Metamagical Themas.)
Anybody else remember this? Better, do you have a dead-tree copy to verify my memory? I know I read it somewhere, because I knew the details of the story before I clicked on the headline ...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
