dactyls n' amphimacers

From: The Telegraph

“[…] researchers have encoded the contents of a whole book in DNA, demonstrating the potential of DNA as a way of storing and transmitting information. In a different vein, some artists have begun to create living organisms with altered DNA as works of art. Hence, DNA is a medium for the communication of ideas. Because of the ability of DNA to store and convey information, its regulation must necessarily raise concerns associated with the First Amendment’s prohibition against the abridgment of freedom of speech. […]”
— via the New Shelton wet/dry
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“A genetic disease has been cured in living, adult animals for the first time using a revolutionary genome-editing technique that can make the smallest changes to the vast database of the DNA molecule with pinpoint accuracy.
     Scientists have used the genome-editing technology to cure adult laboratory mice of an inherited liver disease by correcting a single 'letter' of the genetic alphabet which had been mutated in a vital gene involved in liver metabolism.”
— The Independent
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“What is the verse that you've encoded?
It's a very short poem; a very masculine assertion about the aesthetic creation of life. The organism reads the poem, and writes in response a very melancholy, feminine - almost surreal in tone - poem about the aesthetic loss of life. The two poems are in dialogue with each other.

How do you encode your verse into DNA?
There's a standard convention of assigning certain letters to certain amino acids, but this convention is arbitrary. I'm likewise assigning a certain DNA codon to a letter of the alphabet. But there's a series of added constraints. Because I want the genetic sequence enciphering my poem to produce a protein that is, itself, yet another poem, there has to be a mutual correlation between those two sequences. In effect, I'm producing a kind of cryptogram, like something you might see in The Sunday Times, except that my cryptogram is itself a meaningful message that can be deciphered into yet another meaningful message. That's what's made this project very challenging.”
— Jamie Condliffe in conversation with Christian Bök, New Scientist
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" ' " and i quote..." ' "

Photo: Michael Hale

There's a sliding scale of acceptability spanning our culture's citation-free landscape — from the high ground of meme and "general knowledge" to the muddy bog of rip-off and appropriation; from mimicry to theft.
     But what about forgery? It it the same, or the opposite? Plagiarists claim ownership; forgers disavow it. Their common ground, of course, is deception.

"Originally, feathers evolved to retain heat; later, they were repurposed for a means of flight. No one ever accuses the descendants of ancient birds of plagiarism for taking heat-retaining feathers and modifying them into wings for flight. In our current system, the original feathers would be copyrighted, and upstart birds would get sued for stealing the feathers for a different use. Almost all famous discoveries (by Edison, Darwin, Einstein, et al.) were not lightning-bolt epiphanies but were built slowly over time and heavily dependent on the intellectual superstructure of what had come before them. The commonplace book was popular among English intellectuals in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. These notebooks were a depository for thoughts and quotes and were usually categorized by topic. Enquire Within Upon Everything was a commercially successful take-off on the commonplace book in London in 1890. There’s no such thing as originality.
     Invention and innovation grow out of rich networks of people and ideas. All life on earth (and by extension, technology) is built upon appropriation and reuse of the preexisting."
— David Shields, Los Angeles Review of Books
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"That may seem short to you, but according to modern estimates of the entropy in ordinary running English text [thanks to Fernando Pereira for information that led me to revised this post on April 26], if you graph the word positions in English text against the number of words that would be grammatically possible as the next word given the last few words of the text, although the numbers vacillate wildly, the average across them all tends to settle in at something approaching 100. If that's right, then at any arbitrary starting point in an arbitrary text, if text was being composed at random, the probability that you will find the next 14 words match some previously designated sequence of 14 words is very roughly in the region of 1 in 1028, i.e., 0.0000000000000000000000000001." — Geoffrey K. Pullum, Language Log
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“Plagiarism is passing off one’s work as your own, but that doesn’t necessarily make it copyright infringement,” Justin Hughes, the director of the intellectual property law program at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, said. “In an infringement action, a person can use a ‘fair use’ defense. That is, that they didn’t use so many words as to be guilty of infringement.” — The Harvard Crimson
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