11 Comments

  1. Unknown's avatar

    When you follow the source text too closely, even if not an exact copy, that is considered plagiarism. The fact the guy is driving an identical car suggests premeditation.

  2. Unknown's avatar

    Ah, Lehrer. In that Wikipedia entry, there is this tidbit:

    “In 1957, while working for the National Security Agency, Lehrer coauthored a paper in which he snuck in the song’s line “Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifolds” into the reference section as an uncited and unpublished paper by Lobachevsky.”

  3. Unknown's avatar

    I’m reminded of a San Antonio newspaper that suspected a rival paper of copying its high-school football reports. They made up a fake one, wherein all the “player names” were those of their own staff. Sure enough, it appeared in the rival paper, so they ran a full page with the copied story and circles and arrows identifying all the names. Busted!

  4. Unknown's avatar

    From Wikipedia:

    In November 2022, Tom Lehrer formally relinquished the copyright and performing/recording rights on his songs, making all music and lyrics composed by him free for anyone to use, and established a website from which all of his recordings and printable copies of all of his songs could be downloaded.

  5. Unknown's avatar

    IIRC Lehrer had to point out that his songs that were based on tunes still in copyright would not be considered part of his public domain deal

  6. Unknown's avatar

    @beckoningchasm: I am sad to report that nearly 60 years of cultural shift have rendered that story nearly incomprehensible to me. Plus points for (as far as I can tell) more or less accurately describing a black hole before they were en vogue (since he calls it a hypermass and not a black hole), minus points for how simple minded everyone seems to allow such an obvious trojan horse plan to succeed, but mostly the opaqueness informed by a to me incomprehensible sexism left me scratching my head as to the denouement of the story — what is it that Holt sees when the beautiful Lucinda brushes off his unwanted affections? It’s too subtle for me: is it merely the realization that she does not welcome his advances, despite his being the “good” guy? Is it that she is contemplating some much bigger point that I missed, and her brushing his attentions away like a pesky minor irritant highlights the sudden shift in perception that she is masterminding some greater plot that totally eluded me?
    What is the plagiarism you allude to? Not the Berserker’s trojan horse, because that doesn’t save any day; the “plagiarism” that Karlsen is merely frozen and not dead? That’s not really plagiarism. Something about the allusion to Poe that I don’t understand? (Did Karlsen survive by escaping the black hole while leading the Berserker into it, something we are supposed to realize because of the red shift as they approached the event horizon? He masked his escape via the red shift? But how? Is this the plagiarism?)

    It’s sad that something so relatively recent has already been rendered incomprehensible to me via linguistic and cultural shift. I’ve been struggling with 19th century authors, where for the most part I can get what they are talking about (though sometimes not — Henry James for example); anything older and I just can’t. I been reading a lot of economics recently, and I’ll just have to take the various author’s praise of Adam Smith as given, because I can’t even read a single sentence quotation of his in context and understand his syntax.

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