Labels: memory

Too many of my labels have been used once and once only. It's uneconomical, and slightly sad, so I've decided to repeat my earlier bonding exercise, in which I take two otherwise isolated labels and unite them. It's a little gesture of love, in this often loveless world. I'll try and make each pair as memorable as possible. As it was before, this is a memory exercise.

authority: david letterman
embarrassment: health
holocaust: libraries
plants: plagiarism
patti smith: roses
scientology: semi-colon

Shades of Alan Turing

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but unacknowledged plagiarism can leave a slightly bitter taste in the first begetter's mouth. In mine, at least. A story I wrote some years ago, called SOAP, has popped up in a number of places after being published by the online magazine East of the Web.

Generally they're student crib sites where for every 1,000 words you copy you have to provide a 1,000 words of new material. I suspect this is true of this site, which doesn't seem to open any longer, though I may be wrong. The story obviously has no value in terms of student assignment, so it's both a random and an innocuous sort of intellectual theft, and not worth bothering about.

But I'm more intrigued by this site, owned by Doctor Bojan Cukic of West Virginia University. As professor of computer science and electrical engineering, he seems to have used my story to develop some kind of code based on sequences of six letters. I've written to ask him what he's up to.

I'll let you know if he replies.