Flowers - a cosmic, comic interpretation

Imagining how our customs appear from an alien perspective is always a great comic device, so this cartoon is pretty funny, and a good introduction to SMBC Comics (Saturday morning breakfast cereal, in case you didn't know).  Some of our flower customs are pretty ancient; apparently Neanderthals were buried with bundles of flowers.  However, no matter how amusing, TPP remains annoyed by the idea that floral parts are plant genitalia.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  The gaudy floral parts are largely sterile, modified leaves with a function of attraction.  The other parts are sporophylls, modified leaves bearing sporangia, a form of asexual reproduction.  This rather carries the wrong message doesn't it?  Sterility and no sex involved.  But clearly giving the focus of your affection a vial of pollen (Look at all those virile haploid male plants!) may send the wrong message.  Of course the plant genitalia misconception is also very long standing as are the very wrong labels derived from this misconception (gynoecium, androecium, ovary, ovule).  So every semester TPP girds his loins to battle once again such misconceptions, generally losing out to in some cases to the "I don't care if it's wrong, it's how I know it" complacency.  HT to a Million Gods. 

Attack of the clones!

You get a lot of funny, some funny ha-ha, some funny sad, surveys when you work at a university because lots of younglings are engaged in what passes for research in the non-sciences.  So the Phactor gets a call; it's a survey question.  Would you eat a cloned organism?  Certainly.  So, you think cloned food is OK.  Yes, cloned food is OK.  In fact you probably do not go a day of your life without eating cloned food.  No. Yes.  What?  Let's just start with potatoes and sugar.  And what makes you think cloning is bad?  And what taking a survey rule allows you to call faculty on the phone?  It's an informal survey.  Ah, yes, so actually what you are doing is not sanctioned by the university or any faculty adviser, correct?  Thanks for your time.  Click.  At least they understand that being polite is a good policy when breaking all the other rules.  It seems that some math students got all fractionated about the idea of cloned food demonstrating their serious need of some biology courses.  They didn't know how common cloning is among plants, and to teach them about the efficiency of asexual reproduction they are sentenced to weeding my strawberry bed, as soon as they learn about species, that is.