2011-03-29
Explanation
This comic satirizes media fearmongering about China overtaking the United States in scientific output. The first panel shows a sensationalist news anchor warning about China's rising scientific production as a "Red Threat," playing on Cold War-era anxieties.
The second panel, "What's Actually Happening," shows a graph where both countries' paper output is rising, with the USA still ahead but China catching up -- a much less alarming picture than the news suggests. The third section, "How I Decided to Prove a Point," shows someone running a "papergenerator.exe" that auto-generates trivially obvious math papers (e.g., "Proof of the equivalence of 2+2 and 4").
The final panel brings the joke full circle: by using this automated paper generator, Zach Weiner (the comic's author) has himself overtaken the United States in scientific output, producing "up to infinity papers," and the news now frames him as the new "Red Threat." The comic mocks both the media's tendency to frame neutral statistics as existential threats and the fact that raw paper count is a poor metric for scientific achievement, since it can be trivially gamed.