Friday, August 14, 2009

The geekiest thing I've seen all day

Maybe all week. And I had an amateur radio club meeting last night, and am sitting here blogging with the SciFi* channel going.

But Wired magazine has an article on a bunch of Canuck grad students who mathematically modelled how to respond to a Zombie outbreak.
Having spent a fair amount of time mixing science with beer in the wee hours while trying to finish a thesis, I’m guessing that at some point, a graduate student who had spent far too many hours tweaking a mathematical model of infectious disease in the basement of a Canadian university said something like this: “What would happen if we made it so they could come back to life?”

This was followed by the other math students in the basement gathering around the computer, happily creating a plausible model for the outbreak of infectious zombie disease, and then brainstorming on how to make their model relevant.


“Clearly, this is an unlikely scenario if taken literally,” they wrote. “But possible real-life applications may include allegiance to political parties, or diseases with a dormant infection.”
The scientifically derived answer? Massive firepower, immediately applied.

*I refuse to call it "Sighfye" or whatever their re-branding is. Hell, I have to grit my teeth to say "Sci Fi".

2 comments:

LibertyNews said...

I hate the rebrand, but they do seem to be improving the lineup with shows like Warehouse 13. Now if they would just pick up The Sarah Conner Chronicles...

Home on the Range said...

Sarah Conner Chronicles. I would SO watch that.

I always thought I was pretty smart, until I went to visit my father in law who was professor of robotics at an east coast university. There, in the classroom, was this robotic arm that would play ping pong with you. A camera on it's "arm" would look at you hitting the ball back, "do the math" and hit back. It would usually win. It was built by a freshman. I realized in that moment, I was NOT near as smart as I thought I was.