Watching rice cook might be more interesting than you’d imagine

Watching rice cook might be the Internet equivalent of watching grass grow.

But if you’ve got the time, you don’t need the rice, because eRiceCooker will do everything for you – even supply someone to eat the rice.

This project, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, is designed to track Internet news items about genetically modified food. Each time an item is found, the apparatus dispenses a quarter cup of rice into the cooker.

Then, according to the website, “When the cooker has enough rice for a meal, water is added automatically to the rice and the cooker is switched on. When the rice is done, an email is sent out to invite people to eat the rice. The more news reports appear, the more rice is cooked, the more often invitations are sent out.”

The site administrators expect “excessive amounts of cooked rice” to draw attention to issues surrounding genetically modified organisms.

You can watch a demonstration and sign up to receive GM rice e-mails at web.media.mit.edu/~rusti/eRiceCooker/

And if for some reason you can’t get out of the house to watch grass grow – yes, the Internet has that taken care of too: watching-grass-grow.com.