Q: Why did the fly fly?
A: Because the spider spied ‘er.
The above, recognized as a lame dad joke by even my three-year-old boy, is apparently the origin of the name of our stimulus software system FlyFly. Combined with our data acquisition system SampSamp, it inspired Alex Oo while working in our lab to call his new spike clustering program ClusClus, “just to fit in with our naming convention”.
It would seem FlyFly is a pretty safe bet as a unique name for a software program, but a little idle curiosity led me to Google, in order to find out whether anything else shares the name. This revealed that FlyFly is also the name of: a travel agency in Serbia, a Chinese company specializing in manufacturing replica aeroplanes, an awesome snazzy lamp designed in Milan, a mysterious 3-minute short film from Canada, and a nice holiday apartment in Bosnia!
Just goes to show the variety of uses that can be made from a simple reduplication…