SMBC posted a neat comic today summarizing Stuart Ritchie’s Science Fictions, which talks about issues in the scientific/academic community process.
jpinard
1708
Excellent. Wish there would be major reform in the University system for this, but sadly I think 90% of them just don’t care.
These guys buried the lead if you ask me, because the coolest part is that the spinach is detecting freakin’ landmines! Engineered so when they detected contaminants from the mines, it emits an infrared signal, which triggers an email.
RichVR
1710
I had to check if this was The Onion.
What a weird way to kick off Skynet.
Isn’t the whole point of landmines not to be detected? Feels like cheating somehow.
The spinach is emailing us there’s a land mine here is a strange sentence to parse.
Gives new meaning to the phrase “tossed salad”.
No one “taught” spinach to “send emails”.
Not to take away from the beauty of the idea, but what a fuckin dumb headline.
Timex
1717
It is interesting that they were able to create spinach that can create an infrared signal though.
And yet here we are all discussing it. So from the perspective of the person who wrote that headline it was completely successful. This message brought to you by your daily reminder that ALL “news” media is entertainment first and factual information dissemination second.
RichVR
1720
My spinach is stupid. It still writes letters.
You are all making me dill.
Enidigm
1725
Spinach communicating with itself just seems like the tip of the iceberg. I wonder if the messages will become more romaine as time goes on.
Spinach teaches scientists to write headlines
