Via Dave and linuxmafia: A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. Back when generating random numbers was hard, this kind of thing was a Nobel Prize for Literature-winning masterpiece. The RAND corporation even has an errata slip for the book, although it’s not the mythical errata to the digits themselves which Murray Gell-Mann mentions in Chapter 4 of The Quark and the Jaguar (”RANDomness”, p. 44):

What I found interesting about the report was a small piece of paper (a “blow-in”) that fluttered out of it and fell to the floor. I picked it up and found it was an errata sheet. The RAND mathematicians were supplying corrections to some of the random numbers! Were they catching random errors in the random numbers?

Either he just made the story up for its comic value, or the RAND mathmos were issuing secret underground corrections…

ObConspiracy: the permutation tables for DES, the Data Encryption Standard developed in the 1970s with NSA involvement, are supposedly random. If this book was the source of the random numbers, then perhaps the errors were how the NSA snuck weak numbers into the standard. Naturally, RAND would’ve been compliant. Scenario: lone RAND mathematician discovers the numbers have been cooked and tries to issue the errata sheet, but is immediately promoted to icicle-counter in Deadhorse, Alaska. The unofficial errata slip is released clandestinely through direct placement in library editions…