Recitation #20 - Pavlov and Schrödinger

Consider: if the cat is both dead and alive at the same time, does that mean Schrödinger's cat is a zombie?

If you've got a question for recitation, send it in and we'll see what we can do. Remember to put 'Recitation Question' in the subject line. Otherwise, feel free to post in the forums or on the Facebook page (where we pulled today's from).

FOLLOW-UP COMMENT FROM DANTE: A few hours after posting the comic, I was informed that Darby Conley's "Get Fuzzy" had been using the above premise for the past week. After checking and seeing that the last five Get Fuzzy comics were about a dog and cat fighting, I was pissed for being accused of plagiarism, so I responded with a rant on Twitter and a nasty email. After which some of my readers informed me that the recitation question was indeed asked by one character in the July 10th Get Fuzzy comic, a week ago today.

I was an avid Get Fuzzy reader for years, even after I stopped getting newspapers, so I apologize to Darby Conley for what may seem like taking a question debated by his characters and using it for my own comic. Also, I apologize to the emailer for the rip job he/she received as a response when I flew off-the-handle.

I really do try to go out of my way and make sure I don't plagiarize or steal any ideas from anyone else, be it comic or webcomic or otherwise. I take a lot of pride in making sure that STW remains as original as possible, which is why the comic doesn't use a stick-figure style (like xkcd) and why the comic purposely breaks the fourth wall (unlike most of A Softer World). So if any comic looks like it has taken an idea directly from another source, it truly is unintentional.

There's a lot of comedy out there right now, in a hundred different forms, so we're at the point in society where accidental plagiarism is probably going to happen more often than we'd like to admit, but please don't believe I try to use that as an excuse to create something of my own. I may have taken a completely different approach to the question above than Darby Conley did, and taken the idea a lot further, but I'd still rather not brush upon similar topics used by other writers, especially so soon after they touched on them. Creative originality is a major goal of STW, so please, if you're sending in a recitation question, don't steal your idea from something else you've just read or seen. That's really, really not helping.

And now, having drastically swung around on the emotional scale from righteous anger to guilt to anger again, I will now go put my fist through a wall. Thank you for understanding.