In The Independent today...

Identifying criminals, the work of illustrators, and more on Damien Hirst.

Police identify criminals from texts.

Language scientists believe that it is possible to identify the author of a message by analysing the spelling, grammar and syntax of the words used.

My first thought was that texts are usually quite short and there is a common style of texting with many conventions, so would everyone be different - would there be enough information contained in the texts to identify people uniquely. But I can believe it, it sometime amazes me how individual people are. It would be interesting to do some quick sums on it.

Who do you think they are: Public figures put their personalities on paper.

The thread that runs through this line of picture-making is a "literary" orientation. There's some link to text or story, actual or notional.

(I've put any comments together on this yet, but want to flag it.)

There's only one way to find out what art is 'worth' – and Damien Hirst knows it.

Art has to exist within a marketplace, and Hirst is not only brave but honest in exposing the value of his art to what the market thinks of it

The marketplace, in this sense, exists entirely as information, so I think there's something useful here in the connections between the information of conceptual art and the information of the marketplace.