Why bother talking to plants?

Every time a scientist enters a laboratory, or a statistician crunches a dataset, or a researcher takes a sample, we get yet another glimpse of how fragile the scientific orthodoxy of the consensus crowd is. Here is another example. Plants, it now appears, are chatty things that talk to each other via a sort of internet thing. No really! Check out the illustrations on this university website. See the keyboards the plants use?

And all our lives we’ve been told plants need us to talk to them to keep them happy. As if we really matter to the rest of the planet. This finally explains why my lone office pot plant looks so down: it’s pining for vegetable company.

(Hat tip: ArsGeek.)

PS. I know I’ve probably posted too often today, but I received some very vicious vitriol from a disgruntled fan who wanted just one more post. So here it is. One more. Suggestions from regular readers on posting frequency and other improvements I could make for your reading pleasure are, of course, always welcome.