2011-11-28
Explanation
This comic illustrates what Zach Weinersmith calls "the scariest thing about science." In the first panel, a woman complains that her carrot cake has raisins in it. Her companion, a bespectacled man who is clearly a scientist, muses aloud: "Huh. I wonder if you could make a beam that only destroys fruit." The woman responds with an ominous "Iiiinteresting..."
The second panel jumps forward two years, where a military officer announces to a colleague: "We have a way to wipe out the enemy'''s crops." The joke is that an innocent, idle curiosity about removing unwanted raisins from baked goods has, through the relentless logic of scientific inquiry, been weaponized into a tool for agricultural warfare. The comic satirizes the dual-use problem in science, where research motivated by the most trivial and benign questions can end up having devastating military applications.
The votey panel extends the joke with a callback to the original complaint. The scientist, now eating his carrot cake, reports: "No raisins, but the Geiger counter is going nuts." He dismisses the radiation with "Ech... it'''s fine," suggesting the fruit-destroying beam turned out to be some form of radiation weapon. The punchline underscores the absurd cost-benefit analysis at play: the raisins are gone, but the cake is now radioactive, and the scientist could not care less.